Guilt

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GUILT

by Caryll Houselander

SHEED & WARD - NEW YORK - 195:

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COPYRIGHT, 1951, BY SHEED & WARD, INC.

Nihil Obstat
Reverend Michael P. Noonan, S.M.

Diocesan Censor

Imprimatur
MM Richard J. Cushing
Archbishop of Boston

Date:
Tune 15, 1951

The Ninil Obstat and the Impzimatur are ecclesiastical declarations that
a publication is free of doctrinal or moral error, not a statement of the
positive worth, nor an implicatioa ‘hat the contents have the Archbishop’s

2pproval or recommendation.

SUIT 26

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Introduction

ix

Part One: THE SENSE OF GUILT AND THE REALITY xvii

@ Guin oo bo

- SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE GUILT FEELING

THE REALITY OF GUILT

- RELIGIONS OF ESCAPE

- MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE
- THE HOMING TOAD

»- CONFESSION

Part Two: GUILT, SUFFERING, AND CHRIST

- CHRIST AND GUILT

- THE REAL REPRESSION

- THE HUMAN DESTINY

- GUILT AND SUFFERING

» FRUSTRATION

- ACCEPTANCE

»- THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE

Part Three: INTEGRITY

. CHILD, MAN, SOUL

. THE CHILD IN MAN

. THE CHILD IN GOD

. THE SON

. THE MEASURE OF JOY

Part Four: ILLUSTRATIONS

IRMA GRESE
LEOPOLD AND LOEB

1

:

CONTENTS

JOHN GEORGE HAIGH 221
PETER KURTEN : 224.
BENEDICT JOSEPH LABRE 236
TERESA MARTIN 238
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 240
FRANZ KAFKA 251
RAINER MARIA RILKE 257
RIMBAUD 268
CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 268

Postscript 275

ILLUSTRATIONS

PETER KURTEN

TERESA MARTIN
BENEDICT JOSEPH LABRE
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
LEOPOLD AND LOEB
Franz Karka

oli

INTRODUCTION

THE most striking characteristic of the age in which we are living
is psychological suffering. Even against the background of un-
paralleled physical and material suffering, this psychological suf-
fering stands out as vividly as scarlet stands out on a background
of drabs and greys. The mental hospitals and psychiatry clinics
are full to capacity and a steady stream of sufferers are making
the waiting lists longer and longer; in England “borderline cases”
have been told, in some instances, that they may have to go on
waiting for eight years. An audience with the Pope or the King
could hardly be more difficult to get than an appointment with a
psychiatrist.

There are, however, other places besides hdspitals and clinics
where one can at least be sure of examination and diagnosis from |
expert psychologists, though not always sure of the right treat-
ment—the prisons and Borstals: but these too are filled to capacity
with psychotics, neurotics, hysterics, schizoids and psychopathic
personalities.

The contrast between life inside a hospital or prison today and
life in the world is not so great as might be supposed, perhaps the
greatest difference being that inside the institutions it is more
regular and more disciplined, and that among all the emotionally
and mentally disturbed people there are a few, sane or very nearly
sane, trying to help the sufferers. Outside, there are just as many
insane, psychotic and neurotic people, just as many borderline
cases, just as many people who are their own torment; but there .
is no regularity, no order or discipline that they accept, and in
most cases no one to help them.

There is one form of psychological suffering for which there is
as yet no medical term and no admission to hospital or clinic—

ix

x INTRODUCTION

usually, but not always, the sufferers even keep out of prison. I
have named this ego-neurosis. Ego-neurosis is a disease of the
soul, a spiritual rather than a psychological ailment. It consists in
a thrusting forward of the self; it may take the form of self-
analysis, self-defense, self-obsession, self-aggrandizement, humili-
ation in being self, self-frustration or countless others, but it is
grounded in self-love.

For the most part, ego-neurotics do not go to extremes, they are
not listed among the abnormal. Their condition is a condition of
spiritual weakness, it is largely because their souls and their minds
are half-starved that they are ill in this way at all.

Usually they are people who suffer consciously merely from
a vague and persistent unhappiness, an inexplicable sense of guilt
about everything they do or don’t do, a shrinking from effort,
especially mental effort, a certain sense of frustration and a hidden
stirring of shame because they feel inadequate before life—they
suffer continually from embarrassment, very often from boredom
—which is inability to respond to stimulus—and always from
anxiety in some form or other. Their tragedy is less that they are
most of the time unhappy, than that they have lost the capacity
for ever being really happy at all. Of such people, the greatest
of all the psychologists, C. G. Jung, wrote: “About a third of all
cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis but from
the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.”®

It is of ego-neurotics that this book has been written.

The depressing condition of mankind I have just described is
not wholly depressing. Indeed, in the psychological suffering of
modern man, I see the first great beam of hope for human gj, gs.
Pain is a merciful thing when it comes as a warning that there is
something wrong with the body; it is intended to warn the sufferer
of some invisible disease, so that it can be diagnosed and gyred
before it kills him; and in most cases, when one is Wise enoy gh
to do something about it at once, at the very first stab of pain the

result will be restoration to health and the capacity to enjoy the
life that has been saved.

_ . sy G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York; Harcourt»
race).

INTRODUCTION xi

Now mankind has for at least three hundred years been suffer-
ing from a deadly disease, materialism. A body must become ill
if only some parts of it are used for the functions they are there
for. If a man decided never to use his legs, they would atrophy
and he would begin to feel the effects in other parts of his body
too, and if he did at last attempt even to walk across the room, he
would break down. To refuse to use vital organs causes fatal
disease.

For several hundreds of years, the majority of mankind in
England and America have ceased to exercise the spiritual part of
their nature.

Human nature is soul and body—men have treated it as if it
were only body. They have not allowed their souls to function at
all. In a vast number of cases they have not allowed even their
minds to function, and besides having a disease of the soul, they
have atrophy of the memory, understanding and the will.

Wars, exploitation of labour, men turned to machines, over-
industrialization, regimentation, destitution, totalitarianism, are
not the cause of man’s psychological disdtder, they are the
result of it. All these things have happened and could only
have happened because the majority of men ceased long ago to
use these three powers of the soul, memory, understanding and
will.

The psychological suffering of our generation means that the
disease in man’s soul is at last giving him pain; it proves that he
really has a soul, for had it been possible for men to adjust them-
selves without ill effects to the wholly material world they have
built for themselves, one might be excused for questioning
whether a creature who could so adjust himself really possessed
an immortal spirit. We might be forgiven for thinking that after
all man is not made of soul and body, but of animal and
machinery, that he does not need love, or beauty, or poetry, or
art, or peace of mind; certainly he does not need to adore. All
that he needs is material bread, sexual intercourse, oiling from
time to time, and a tightening up of the screws which are so
conspicuously loose.

But man has not been able to adjust himself, the pain of his

xii INTRODUCTION
soul's disease is being felt by nearly everyone, and in many cases
it has become unbearable.

The insane, the psychotics, the neurotics are serving a tremen-
dous purpose—they have revealed the disease in unmistakable
terms, and they have forced the enquiry, so long needed, into the
nature of man. We have realized that, just as surgeons could not
operate before they knew the anatomy of the body, a doctor
nowadays cannot treat a patient at all, unless he knows how the
whole man is made and functions. Above all he must know what
a man is.

The enquiry has begun, and gradually scientific research is
pointing to mysteries beyond its own scope, the great ones among
the doctors are beginning to make their researches on their knees.

All this is matter for thanksgiving. But the vast multitudes of
ego-neurotics, whose suffering, though real and persistent, has
not yet become unbearable, have a huge part to fulfill in this
enquiry into the nature of man.

They should not accept the ache of self, like people who let
their teeth ache until the nerves are exposed because they are
afraid of the dentist. But many do, they accept their own im-
potence and mediocrity, their distress and boredom, they resign
themselves to it. This is very near despair.

But just as chronic invalids sometimes find it impossible to
believe that they can ever be cured, ego-neurotics often find it
impossible to realize that they can be happy, that they can have
a zest for life, know the fullness of joy, and even add to the sum
total of life-giving love in the world themselves. The ego-neurotic
is usually lonely, he finds it difficult to explain his unhappiness;
when put into words it sounds trivial, he finds it difficult to find
a sympathetic listener, or one who could help even if he did listen.
As for professional help, the experts have not time enough to give
to all the insane; they have no time at all for the Officially sane,
however mad they may be.

The ego-neurotic has got to help himself; with God’s help, he
must cure himself.

He can do it. If he could only realize the delight that awaits
him, the joy that he could know, the fullness of life that could be
his, he would make the effort required to cure himself.

INTRODUCTION xiii

The single hope that has sustained me in writing this book is
that some ego-neurotic may discover from it the possibilities of
his own happiness, and so begin to make the effort that will bring
him to its realization.

I do not want to force my own theories upon anyone, but to
offer them to those who care to examine them as the only con-
tribution my own ego-neurosis can make to this great enquiry
into man’s nature, in which all mental sufferers can take part.
I offer only what I have learned from my own wrestling with
self-love, and I do so because I believe with Dostoievsky that
“one is really responsible to all men, for all men, and for

everything.”
Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, 1950.

CL i Seed

o

In nature we have our being.
In mercy we have our increasing.

In grace we have our fulfilling.

JULIAN OF NORWICH

mies eres!

PART ONE

The Sense of Guilt and the Reality

Chapter I. SOME PECULIARITIES
OF THE GUILT FEELING

“In our days an individual of exceptional powers can hardly hope to
have so great a career or so great a social influence as in former
times, if he devotes himself to art or to religious and moral reform.
There are, however, still four careers which are open to him; he
may become a great political leader like Lenin; he may acquire vast
industrial power, like Rockefeller; he may transform the world by
scientific discoveries, as is being done by the atomic physicists; or,
finally, if he has not the necessary capacities for any of these careers, or
if opportunity is lacking, his energy in default of any other outlet may
drive him into a life of crime. Criminals, in the legal sense, seldom
have much influence on the course of history, and, therefore, a man of
overweening ambition will choose some other career if it is open
to him.” —BERTRAND RUSSELL, Authority andthe Individual®

THE OUTSTANDING cHARACTERIsTIC of the guilt feeling is its be-
wildering inconsistency. People who lead blameless lives are often
overwhelmed by the sense of guilt, while those who lead guilty
lives may as easily be devoid of it.

Sometimes guilty people are even elated by the thought of the
evil they have done and its tragic consequences. Men have been
known to boast that the eyes of the world are upon them, within
minutes of their own execution for murder. But it is also not
without a certain relish that a particular type of pious person,
with a mania for self-perfection, proclaims herself the “Worst
Sinner in the World.” Is there not some resemblance between her
mentality and that of the megalomaniac with the noose around
his neck?

Among people generally considered to be more normal there
are equally surprising peculiarities.

© (New York: Simon & Schuster).

Bf

2 GUILT

One would expect a reasonable person to feel more guilty after
repeating some particular sin some hundreds of times, until he
has become enslaved and degraded by it, than after the first,
isolated occasion. Of most people the opposite is true. The more
often we do wrong, the less do we recognize ourselves as wrong-
doers; the more we degrade our nature, the less do we suffer
humiliation through our degradation. The more guilty we are, the
less guilty we feel.

When we have so attached ourselves to some evil that it has
become part of ourselves, we cease to admit that it is evil. Not
only that: since, in this situation, we need to compensate our
vanity as well as to delude ourselves, we are ingenious in finding
ways by which our wrongdoing can flatter us.

A man who is an adept thief more often considers himself to
be a clever fellow than a dishonest or mean one. Dickens’ Artfy]
Dodger did not consider picking pockets a mean crime but a
brilliant accomplishment. He focused his mind not on the poverty
of his morality but on the skill of his hand. He was artful—fu)]
of art!

In sins of sensuality particularly, repetition leads beyond mere
callousness to a delusion of superiority. When conscience has been
so thickened and blunted by habit that it has lost its fine edge
altogether, and the feeling of release (both physical and psycho.
logical) which frequently accompanies such sin has swamped
reason, the sinner believes himself, or more accurately feels him.
self, to be above the mass of men: for they are restrained—or, a,
he would say, inhibited or frustrated—by the law of God, by
considerations of honour or pity, and in the last resource by the
blind feeling of guilt. For all such things, he has or thinks he has
a contempt, he believes that he is now different, superior },
other men.

In the violent guilt conflict that in modern times 1s almost
bound to occur in the lives of creative artists, when sensual];
becomes debauchery and the compensation must be as eme
as the failure, people are able to believe not merely that ne) are
-supermen, but that they are supernatural, and dispense fro
natural Jaw. So it was with the poet Rimbaud. His most sy), |

SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE GUILT FEELING 3

pathetic biographer, Enid Starkie, writes of him: “Baudelaire
always kept, in the midst of his worst aberrations, a sense of sin;
Rimbaud, however, would not feel that for him debauch was vice;
he was certain that he himself was above the reach of sin. Later,
looking back on the errors of this time, he said, ‘Moi! Moi! qui
me suis dit mage ou ange, dispensé de toute morale, je suis rendu
au soll’”® This poor boy regarded his life of cruelty and vice as
a martyrdom, and is the hero of many unstable members of our
own intelligentsia—for whom he would undoubtedly have had
contempt, since they are able to identify themselves with him
as martyrs to vice, but not as poets of genius.

One cannot fail to observe that the criminal lunatic, the pseudo-
pietist, and the sexual dilettante and debauchee are brothers and
sisters under the skin—each of them saying, with perhaps a slight
difference in accent, “Thank God, I am not as other men.”

People suffering from religious scruples present further remark-
able discrepancies in guilt feeling.

The subject of scruples generally is a delicate one. They may be
a trial, allowed by God, purifying as the fierce bright fire of
purgatory. Again, there are really sensitive souls, sensitive not to
themselves, but to the purity and beauty of God. To such a one
the tiniest shadow on the light of the soul, created to reflect and
radiate God, is grief hardly to be endured. To the vulgar eye he
will appear to be just another scrupulous person, but he is beyond
the comprehension of the vulgar and outside the scope of this
book. Outside it too is the sufferer from scruples who is really
pathological and requires the help of a doctor.

The type of scrupulous person who is interesting from our
point of view is one who is frequently tormented by some fan-
tastic, trivial scruple, which is not a sin at all, but at the same
time blind to the fact that he habitually commits real sin of
another kind. For example, it is by no means rare to find people
obsessed by anxiety about involuntary suggestions of impurity,
but completely oblivious to their sins of habitual selfishness,
mental cruelty, betrayal of, confidences, and omission of every
aspect of charity. Once again, our pietist leads straight back to the

® Arthur Rimbaud (New York: Norton & Co., 1947), p. 129.

4 GUILT

criminal lunatic. One simply cannot fail to see his likeness to
certain maniacs, indifferent to the fact that they have just clubbed
someone to death, but embarrassed because they have disarranged
their own clothing in the process!

In real neurosis, the guilt feeling, which is often hidden from
the sufferer, is revealed by so many contradictory symptoms that
the uninitiated can hardly fail to be either sceptical or baffled by
them. This book is concerned with people classed as normal, but
one can hardly observe the normal without the help of the ab-
normal, for in neurotic and even psychotic states we see the so-
called normal, including ourselves, under the magnifying glass.
. The neurotic symptoms that many specialists in psychology
attribute to inhibited guilt feelings are like the name of Satan,
legion. Only a few of them can be listed here. There are self-
starvation and its opposite, excessive overeating. Shoplifting, petty
crime. Pathological scrupulosity. An obsession about being fat,
an obsession of fatigue, a compulsion to apologize continually, a
compulsion to continual hand-washing. Puritanism, exhibitionism,
personal dirtiness, excessive personal cleanliness. Masochism,
aggression, sadism, self-pity. Crippling indecision, delusions of
persecution. A mania for being flattered, which is often found in
company with constant disparagement of others. A mania for
being loved, often present in someone without any capacity for
loving. A mania for eroticism, a mania for prurient talk, often
found together with sexual impotence. Confused eyesight, deaf-
ness, failure of the sense of smell. A mania for wishing to be in-
visible; sustained attempts to be inconspicuous by eccentric dress
and behaviour! A mania for walking or cycling to the point of
exhaustion. Hypochondria, melancholy, dypsomania, amnesia,
religious manias, and a host of other disorders, ranging from
blushing to nervous paralysis.

But there are, as well, states symptomatic of buried feelings of
guilt to be found among the members of almost any family
accepted as normal. These could be described as “nuisance
states.” f

Among them is love of making scenes—which may take the

SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE GUILT FEELING : 5

form of bursts of temper, quarrelsomeness, fits of sobbing and
moaning, or almost insufferable demands to be loved.

Again, there is a very common nuisance state which I call the
“pre-pleasure gloom.” Certain people invariably anticipate
pleasure by intense gloom, almost like a psychological “hangover,”
coming before the event instead of after. It seems that it is
necessary for their pleasure that they shall first punish them-
selves for enjoying it—and, of course, this includes punishing
others too. For days before a celebration, or even a family
wedding, they cast out an atmosphere of gloom. I have known
the mother of a large family who could not enjoy the Christmas
celebrations unless she spent Christmas Eve and the morning of
Christmas Day in the cemetery. Not because she remembered
her own dead, or that she was impelled to pray for their souls—
any prayers she did utter on those occasions were objurgatory
prayers against her living relatives. I believe her impulse for going
to the cemetery was that there she could indulge her need to feel
gloomy, and, moreover, could to some extent make her family
feel guilty for their easy attitude to the coming pleasures. When
these pleasures actually came, she appeared to be able to abandon
herself to them more completely than her children, or even her
grandchildren, provided that she had already punished herself
for the fun!

This attitude, directed to pleasure rather than to evil, is among
the commonest idiosyncrasies of the guilt feeling. It has eaten into
large sections of British society like corrosive acid.

We are infected by puritanism, just as many French Catholics
were at one time infected by Jansenism. Puritanism is the prudish,

but rebellious, younger sister of Protestantism, and these sad

sisters are both suspicious of pleasure and of beauty. Between
them, they have given our critics every excuse to dub us hypo-
crites, for to those who have never lived in a Protestant environ-
ment, and cannot imagine our peculiar national guilt conflicts,
there seems no other explanation of the phenomenon of people
who are more shocked by pleasure than by sin/

When anger enters into the guilt feeling, it is nearly always

6 : GUILT

complicated by this puritanical attitude to pleasure, and it takes
terrible, sometimes diabolical forms. One of these is a variety of
projection, that is of projecting the evil in oneself onto some other
person. There are people who will not admit the existence of evil
in themselves, they will not, and ultimately perhaps cannot, allow
the dark side of their nature to invade their consciousness. They
refuse to know it. They have formed a superhuman ideal of them-
selves and will not countenance the possibility of frailty and
sensuality within them, even as a potentiality. But let them main-
tain this class division within their own breast as rigidly as they
may, the fact remains that they, like the rest of us, are children
of a fallen race: concupiscence has become part of their nature,
in them as in everyone lurks the dark heritage of all the evil that

‘has come into the world through original sin: and not only the

majestic sombre shadows of that mysterious evil, but its more
popular aspects—its bawdiness, its insobriety, its vulgarity. All
this they project onto other people. So when they go out from the
shelter of their homes they meet, at every turn, the wanton whom
they have cast out of their own hearts. From the brazen faces of
irresponsible little girls their own frivolity mocks them. They hate
all that is young and provocative, with a hatred which is immeas-
urably more evil than the frailty which provokes it. But this is
because it is not really that frailty that raises such a demon, it is
the festering, repudiated evil self, walking out all unaware in an
Easter bonnet!

There is hardly an evil force more terrible than projected self-
hatred. It is not for nothing we are told to love our neighbour as
ourself, we must tremble lest refusing to come to terms with all
that is self, we hate our neighbour as ourself.

Self-pity often accompanies guilt projection—the pious person,
poisoned by hate, is easily able to believe that it is she who is the
victim of hatred. Mild people with persecution manias are usually
great haters; this, however, is a secret, even from themselves, A
classic story of projection and self-pity is told of Hitler who, when
visiting a village where one of his cruellest purges had been
carried out, wept bitterly, saying “How wicked these people must
be, to have made me do this!”

SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE GUILT FEELING 7

There is such a thing as an artificial guilt feeling, a synthetic
conscience which comes from outside and is imposed by other
people. This is the explanation of many taboos among primitive
people, tribes who, motivated by a natural desire for survival,
imposed prohibitions and laws designed to achieve that end, to
which they gave the solemnity of religious rites.

In Victorian society, we discover taboos and superstitions
which, though they were given the gentlest new names and
camouflaged in the soft drabs and greys of respectability, had
much in common with those of the primitive savages. But it was
not only to preserve life itself, or the life of the race, that these
false consciences were imposed, but to preserve the tyranny of
petty power and the servile homage paid to money and those who
possessed it, no matter whether they had come by it honourably,
or by selling slaves or sweating child labour.

Patriarchs and matriarchs, as parents too often were, had a
positive genius for imposing a sense of guilt on the more devi-
talized of their children, who were educated successfully to feel
that the most harmless action, sometimes any positive action at all,
was guilty. , |

On the other hand, the more robust members of the family—
in those days, unlike ours, usually the sons—were often driven
by the same thing to outbreaks of debauchery, as the only relief
for the nervous tension caused by the sacrosanct atmosphere of
the home, as well as a discharge for their sense of personal guilt,
for which they could not find any reason.

In those Victorian days when the contrast between poverty
and wealth was appalling, the rich were actually able to make
their poor dependents ashamed of having anything that was joyful
or frivolous for their consolation. A governess of the period, for
example, would not have dared to face her God, let alone her
employer, in a “nonsense” hat; while the employer, who did actu-
ally exploit dependence as cruelly as that, was able to regard her
own greater (and superfluous) possessions—her estates, her
antimacassars and furbelows—as a sign of God’s particular favour.

It would, however, be an injustice to compare the Victorians
unfavourably with ourselves, in the matter of creating synthetic

8 GUILT

consciences, or to presume that this is done less cruelly nowadays,
because the “working class” people are now perhaps more gaily
dressed than the rapidly dying out “leisured class.”

Selfishness and fear are just as skilled in producing false con-
sciences as ever they were; today, it is not for having a hat that
a young woman is made to feel guilty, but for having a family.
Here in England, which is rapidly becoming predominantly a
land of old people, there are millions of young men and women
who have been deliberately conditioned to feel that the wholesale
murder of their unborn children is a right and proper thing,
whilst giving children life is a sin against society.

Compare this with the custom (imposed, no doubt, by argu-
ments similar to those used to introduce the teaching of contra-
_ ception into the government clinics) in certain primitive tribes,
which compelled the aged to climb a high tree, and swing from
the topmost branch, so that if they lacked the strength to cling
thus literally to life they should die. In both cases, murder of the
defenseless is the basic idea, and in both cases it is accepted as
the right thing to do.

Individuals, as well as groups, are able to impose guilt feelings
on one another, and the more deeply the emotions are involved,
the more crippling the sense of guilt is likely to be.

Who does not know the young—and old—man who, has a
morbid attitude towards women, the result of the stranglehold of
a positively suffocating maternal love during his adolescence,
which has instilled guilt like a cumulative poison into every
potential relationship with any other woman?

In a lighter vein (though, if this has anything to do with the
present almost universal failure to read a book that requires con-
centration, it is not after all so light a matter) is the odd little
quirk so many people have about reading in the daytime, especi-
ally the morning—they hardly feel it can ever be right to read
excepting when the brain is already tired, or else in order to tire
it and so to induce sleep! How many mothers and governesses
there must have been who believed that the Devil found even
more work for minds that were not idle than for hands that were!

It is, however, group, or herd, false consciences that lead to

SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE GUILT FEELING 9

the worst cruelties. Individual cruelty pales into insignificance
beside that of the many-headed monster, for it is imperative for
the monster’s preservation that not one of its heads must think.

No one must come into a herd, who challenges its conventions—
for these keep it not only in existence, but in complacency. These
conventions are not built in a single generation, they are always
upheld by long traditions which give a certain romance to their
stupidity, they are handed down by generations of wishful not-
thinking. The first one that thinks is a threat to the security of the
group. This is why schoolboys, who profess contempt for cow-
ardice, are able to bully and torture any single small boy among
them who does not take the impression of the group, like soft wax;
and this the tormentors do, not only with undisturbed consciences,
but with elation in their sense of solidarity and power, and their
touching loyalty to the spirit and traditions of the old school.

Not unlike the worst that schoolboys are capable of is the ex-
traordinary conscience which enables Christians to think it right
to encourage hatred of Jews and oppression of coloured people,
and to shudder at marriages between those whose skin is of
different colours, as though such marriages were sinful! What
intricacies of fear and projection and suggestion, of convention
and tradition, have gone to the making of such consciences as
these!

Whenever a murder is committed and the police are still looking
for the murderer, a number of people who are perfectly innocent
of the crime give themselves up for it. Under a similar compulsion
school children have been known to “own up” to misdeeds of
which they know nothing—the atmosphere of guilt was created
by the solemnity of the teacher, and suggestion combined with
the inner compulsion to relate the feeling of guilt to something
definite. On the other hand, it is often because the real murderer,
though perfectly aware of what he has done, feels no guilt, and
the real offender at school likewise feels none, that they are able
to evade suspicion.

A curious example of guilt feeling, which is at once imposed
and repressed, is that suggested by the attitude of the average
Englishman to Roman Catholicism. He prides himself, this Eng-

10 GUILT

lishman, on being broad-minded, a respecter of every man’s
conscience or lack of conscience, tolerant of everyone's belief or
unbelief. If one of his friends chose to become a Quaker, a Plym-
outh Brother, a Baptist, an Anglo-Catholic, or even a Mormon,
he would consider it no business of his. But let one become a
Roman Catholicl—all toleration is thrown away, he will not
hesitate, when remonstrance fails, to resort to aggressiveness,
even sometimes to insults. His friend, he tells him, has taken leave
of his senses, he has proved himself a coward unable to face the
burden of thinking for himself, an escapist from life, a traitor to
his country. Moreover, he suspects him henceforth not only of
trying to convert himself, but even of trying to get him into the
Church by trickery. He is always on the defensive.

Sometimes he admits that the church services have a certain
beauty but he fears their attraction, which he feels is another
lure to something undefined, but sinister and threatening. In fact,
he reacts much as a man who is painfully aware of a hereditary
tendency to drunkenness: he dreads it because he knows that it
is in his blood, yet for that very reason he can hardly resist it. So
it is with the Englishman’s fear of Catholicism. Whether he is
good or bad, Catholicism is in his blood. Few if any of us are not
descended from apostates. Few if any English families were not
once Catholic: and Catholicism, even in the blood, is stronger
and more ineradicable than drink. Our forefathers, if they were to
endure going on living with themselves and with their children,
had to justify their infidelity. Therefore they built up a sinister
picture of Catholicism, which has been handed down the years,
and has set up a conflict between the irresistible attraction and
the bogey lurking just below the surface of memory.

There are many curious delusions brought about by the sense
of guilt. To give only one of them as an example, it is a popular
delusion that time lessens and ultimately wipes out sin, merely
because the sense of guilt grows duller with the passing of time—
it is like a chronic ache, such as rheumatism, which we can
undoubtedly get used to, and actually feel less when we have
borne it longer. Moreover, chronic aches and a chronic sense of
guilt both respond to innumerable drugs.

SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE GUILT FEELING li

Perhaps the most curious of all the manifestations of the guilt
feeling is to be found in the saints. While criminals are often free
from it, the saints never are, they are more aware of the sense of
guilt than any other people. They too, like the overscrupulous
pietist, frequently declare themselves to be the greatest of all
sinners, but there is this enormous difference between them—the
pietist says this in an attempt to find a formula that will relieve
her of suffering, but the saint says it as an invitation to the suffer-
ing of the whole world. St. Teresa of Avila, with her tremendous
“To suffer or die,” spoke for all the saints.

Yet another curious discrepancy: while the guilt feeling dis-
integrates all others, even those who manage to escape the actual
pain of it, it integrates the saints. In them it is the blackness of
the alchemical gold.

Chapter lx. THE REALITY OF GUILT

“1 do not see that we can possess the light of intelligence without the
pupil of the holiest faith which is inside the eye, and if this light is
darkened or clouded by self-love the eye has no light and therefore can-
not see, so not seeing cannot know the truth.”—stT. CATHERINE OF
SIENA®

AFTER even so brief a glance at only a few of the inconsistencies
of the feeling of guilt, we can hardly wonder that there is a popu-
lar inclination to think that guilt itself is not a reality at all, but
something purely subjective, an emotional malaise, which can be
cured by a psychotherapist, or even in milder cases by reading
superficial articles on psychology in newspapers and magazines,
or having tea and a chat with a friend “who knows something
about psychology.”

Widespread faith in psychology encourages this view. I say
faith, because it is a fact that many people accept psychotherapy
not as a form of treatment for functional neurosis, which is all
that it claims to be, but as a faith. This is not surprising, because
psychotherapy, as it is imagined to be by the multitude, is an
escape from facing the reality of guilt and the personal responsi-
bility which it involves. Escape is a keyword in the study of guilt.
If the feeling of guilt is no more than a psychological disorder,
not only can we hope to be rid of all individual responsibility for
sin, but even of the guilt feeling.

It does seem at first sight that a feeling so divorced from reason
and common sense cannot have its origin in reality. If this feeling
is no indication of the true state of our conscience, no guide to

® Piero Misciatelli, The Mystics of Siena (New York: Appleton-Century,

12

THE REALITY OF GUILT 18

what is wrong and what is right; if we can be made uneasy equally
by what is bad, indifferent or positively good; if the feeling can
manifest itself in so many different ways, fantastic, contradictory,
and apparently as little within our control as a rise of temperature;
if moreover it can be imposed upon us from outside—what
possible coherence can it have for us at all?

, Yet this unreality surrounding the feeling of guilt points straight
to the reality of guilt.

There must be a reason why proneness to the feeling of guilt
. is almost universal; why, even when there has been no outside
influence to induce it, it exists, often in people of unquestionable
purity of heart, varying from a vague floating anxiety to a slow
cumulative poisoning of the whole personality. There must be a
reason why those who do not feel guilty at all are usually the most
corrupt, and why the feeling of guilt can be induced and imposed
by a countless variety of means and meets with so little resistance.
Can we really avoid the conclusion that there is something within
us all which responds immediately to the suggestion of guilt?

Clearly human nature is fertile soil for this suggestion. The
sowing of good seed in human nature is always precarious. It may
take root, it may not. It may come to flower, it may wither away.
But the sowing of the bad seed of synthetic guilt is never pre-
carious: that always thrives in our fetid soil. It always bears its
poisonous flower, taking a thousand grotesque shapes and colours,
like evil, luminous fungi, in dark undergrowths, swamps and
cellars.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that guilt is a reality, that
we feel guilty because we are guilty, but that the feeling has been
misplaced, dislocated from its true cause, and is seeking some
cause to which to attach itself.

We resemble those people who are suffering from cancer, but
who, because cancer is something which they will not face, seek
desperately for some other explanation of their symptoms.

By all means let us have any illness, any peculiarity, to explain
our uneasiness, provided it lets us escape the real explanation,
guilt in the roots of our being, involving us in the responsibility
and in the suffering of the whole world, compelling us to lifelong

14 GUILT

conflict within ourselves. We prefer a thousand times to think
of ourselves as neurotics, even as psychotics, rather than as
responsible human beings, carrying the burden of sin, and
threatened by the torrent of darkness that we are trying to dam
up in the depths of our being.

We will not, and, spiritually devitalized as we are today, cannot,
face our own guilt, that terrible force of agelong evil and suffering
which is the inheritance of every descendant of Adam, of every
man who comes into the world. Man was created for joy, but
the first man sinned, and as a result of his sin suffering came into
the world.

The immediate result of the first sin was psychological suffering,
that kind of suffering which can be experienced only by human
beings, who have minds and souls as well as bodies.

In the penetrating light of God, self-knowledge became un-
bearable to Adam. Bitter, inescapable conflict had entered his
nature and divided him against himself. God was the source of
his joy, but now he was constrained to hide from God. Now, in-
stead of keeping its unhindered capacity to delight in good, his
whole nature lurched downwards and dragged him towards evil.

The effects of his sin had in some mysterious way entered into
nature. He was no longer lord over the animals, they were no
longer his gentle comrades, but a danger to him. Even the earth
and the skies had become incalculable and menacing; from now
on he could not have even the simplest good thing, such as bread,
without effort and self-conquest. In order to eat and to feed his
wife and children, he would have to wrestle unceasingly with the
elements, with storm and frost, driving winds ang withering heat
with the weeds and the thorns and the thistles choking the seed
he had sown.

His passions, which before he sinned had been at his command
a source not only of delight but of sanctity, hag become like
demons possessing him, ready at any moment to swamp and
shatter him, to destroy him and with him the woman he loved.
He must wrestle with them, even more fiercely, even more unceas-
ingly, than with all the rest of creation. He mys experience
hunger and thirst, cold and heat, fatigue, pain, sicknesg and death.

THE REALITY OF GUILT 15

Everything had been violated by his sin—his soul, his:mind, his
capacity to love, his work, his environment, his body. Everything
that applies to Adam applies to us, who are his children.

Our human nature, inherited from him, is fallen human nature,
therefore suffering human nature.

Psychological suffering is our portion. Self-knowledge is un-
bearable to us, unless we have the rare courage that is willing to
be purified by fire. We are in conflict with ourselves. We long
insistently for happiness, yet our inclinations drag us, remorse-
lessly and always, towards the things which ultimately destroy
even the capacity for happiness. We cannot get, let alone keep,
the simplest good thing without waging war on self, without irk-
some self-discipline and self-denial. Like Adam we must wrestle
continually with the elements, our vast cities do not save us from
them, and the forces which scientific discovery could have har-
nessed for man’s healing and good threaten his very existence.

Our passions are always ready to destroy us, and with us those
whom we love.

Work, intended to be a delight, has become an almost intoler-
able burden.

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:

the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.°

Man did not stop sinning after Adam. On the contrary, each one
of us, besides having inherited original sin and the suffering that
it has caused, has added to the world’s suffering by his own sins.

We have therefore a double obligation as human beings. As
children of Adam we share with all other human creatures the
guilt of our whole race, and the obligation to shoulder our share
of the burden consequent upon it; and as individual sinners we
have an obligation to wrestle unceasingly with ourselves.

The human race is bound together by a solidarity of guilt;

* From “God’s Grandeur” in Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (New
York and London: Oxford University Press).

16 GUILT

personal strife and personal sorrow are a debt which we owe to
one another.

We have a double obligation which at first sight seems para-
doxical, both to accept suffering and to wrestle with it. We are
obliged to do all that we individually can to alleviate the pain
and sickness of mind and body that afflict mankind, to wage war
on misery, want and injustice, to use every natural means given
to us to do this, as well as to strike straight at the evil that is the
root cause of it all, with supernatural weapons of prayer and
sacrifice. But at the same time we are obliged as human creatures
to accept the common lot, the continual assaults of temptation,
the continual necessity for effort, the sweat and toil of work, the
frustrations and failures, the hardships and difficulties and con.
tradictions of daily life, its sickness and insecurity, its fatigues
and pains, its sorrows and bereavements, and our own death, To
regard ourselves as exceptions, somehow exempt from the
common lot of fallen men, is to attempt to separate ourselves from
humanity.

There is another result of Adam’s sin—I shall only refer to
here, but it will be discussed more fully a little later—which
changes the whole face of suffering, and lifts our labours onto
different plane, a transfiguration of sorrow; and yet from this to,
modern man shrinks.

Christ chose to use suffering and death as the means of oy,
redemption. It was Christ who paid the debt that the human
race owed to God, for no one else could have paid it, it had to be
one who is God and is Man; he made it possible for each ma,
individually to work out his own salvation.

Christ could have redeemed the world by a single tear o, ,
single breath, but he chose to redeem it in the way that Showeg
the utmost possible love, through taking all the suffering of guilt
on himself, wedding himself to our sorrow, and offering the
sacrifice of his own death on the cross. “Greater love than thi,
no man has, that he lay down his life for his friends.

We as Christians live with Christ's life. He lives our life, We are
offered the glory of living his. But on earth it is impossible ¢,
respond to this offer, which involves loving with his love, Withoyt

THE REALITY OF GUILT 17

accepting what he accepted as man, that is, not only a fragment
of the world’s guilt, but all of it, all the suffering caused by sin,
the world-sorrow. The suffering of the whole world is the concern
of each one of us.

It is from the responsibility of guilt that modern man turns
away, from the constant effort of self-conquest, from the accept-
ance of the world’s suffering as his own business which he cannot
shelve, and most of all from the mysterious destiny of his Christ-
hood, with its imperious challenge to surrender himself body and
soul to Christ’s uncompromising, illimitable love.

Chapter In. RELIGIONS OF ESCAPE

“Society and Christianity: —The burden of Christianity is really a very
light one. She does not require us to believe the Christian religion,
she has very vague ideas as to what the Christian religion is, much less
does she require us to practise it. She is quite satisfied if we do not
obtrude our disbelief in it in an offensive manner. Surely this is no
very grievous burden.”—sAMUEL BUTLER in Note Books of Samuel
Butler.

Escare, I have said, is a keyword in the study of guilt. Today
Freudianism is the popular religion of escape, but it is not one
which has broken on mankind with the sudden lightning of a new

revelation. It is merely the latest logical step in a series of escape

religions, which have been evolving since the Reformation.

The most striking contribution to escape given by Protestantism
is the escape from self-knowledge. From the beginning and a)j
through its changing phases it has failed to guard men from self.
delusion. In the Church there are three great safeguards againgt
self-delusion: an infallible moral teaching, the sacrament of
Penance, and the doctrine of Purgatory. The teaching leaves may
under no mistake as to what actions are sinful. The sacrament of
Penance forces us to examine our own conscience in the light of
the authoritative moral teaching, so that we can be under yy
mistake as to our own sinfulness; further we must put our sing
into spoken words and admit them to another sinner, we must
abase ourselves before God and offer personal penance, sej¢_
denial, some touch at least of asceticism. The doctrine of Purga.
tory insists on the reality of sin as holding men from the realizeg
presence of God in heaven till every smallest stain and shadoyy
of it is gone from the soul.

18

RELIGIONS OF ESCAPE 19

And all three the Reformers let go: and with them the means by
which men would know what sin is, would know their own sin-
fulness, would be kept in continuous awareness of sin’s enormity
and the means of its healing.

Never, at any time in its fluctuating history, has Protestantism
been the religion that sinners need. When it reached its peak in
Victorian England, it had become, in its mainstream anyhow, a
religion of the virtuous and respectable, or rather of those who
really believed in their own virtue because they were able to sin
so respectably!

It was the respectability of the country houses, smooth green
lawns, garden fétes, croquet, soothing and soporific hymns and
equally soothing and soporific port, depending not a little on
ample material resources, and giving, to those who enjoyed them,
a quite special twist to the psalm which declares that “The Lord
is my Shepherd, I shall not want.”

Men went to church because they felt themselves to be good
enough to go, not because they knew themselves to be bad enough
to have to go.

There was a curious idea that goodness and prosperity were
identical. A favourite book of the period, The Fairchild Family,
which was put into the hands of adolescents to “improve” them,
advances this idea without a shred of humour: Mrs. Fairchild,
who constantly preaches sermons to her children, makes no bones
about telling them that their family’s ample means is a sign of
God’s preference for them!

Undoubtedly it is easier for the rich to feel good than it is for
the poor, not because wealth shields them from temptation and
sin, but because it makes it less easy for them to recognize tempta-
tion and sin for what they are. It is more difficult for the revered
master of the house, who has to be helped to bed by his tactful
valet, to feel degraded, than it is for the homeless old man in
the street who has to be helped to a bench in the cells by a police-
man. The poor commit as many sins of pride as the rich, but pride
is a painful sin to the poor, a pleasurable one to the rich; the pride
that is roused by a snub hurts, the pride that is inflated by flattery
soothes. All too often the dependents of wealthy people share the

20 GUILT

guilt of their complacency through flattery, so too do the social
climbers and hangers-on. Wherever there are people who are
inflated like frogs in wet weather by their position and prestige
there are certain to be servile people, who like to be patronized
and who are partakers in the guilt of their patrons.

Again, it is easier to imagine oneself possessed of the charity
that covers a multitude of sins if one can give easily of material
things, than if one has in fact nothing but oneself to give. So far
as benevolence in his own home and his own village went, the
Victorian was usually above reproach, but he did not understand
the need to give spiritual alms—prayer, self-denial, reparation.
_ His conscience, lulled to complacency from which there was
nothing to rouse it, was not often troubled by the state of the
world beyond the village. That is why his religion in its heyday
did better in the country than in the town, and tended to become
‘more parochial than universal.

In the big cities guilt is always visible. Today it is visible in
the ruins. In Victorian days it was visible in conditions that
brought our disasters about, and which exist still, but are more
carefully hidden. Material destitution, moral dereliction, drunk.
enness, misery and vice were seen openly in the streets. The most
spiritually blind person cannot come face to face with the.
evidence of guilt day after day, without his complacency being
ruffled by some stirring of doubt about his own immunity fro,
responsibility.

The blindness following the loss of the sense of sin in the goog
Victorian did not consist in not seeing the dreadful contrag
between wealth and poverty which existed, but of taking it fo,
granted that there was nothing that the individual could do about
it. Particularly the poor individual.

The rich man did not know that he was not only in neeq of
contrition himself but that he owed it to all other men; the poo,
man did not know that it was within his power to bestow alms
upon the rich man who passed him by in the street.

Even the dead went without spiritual alms. The Evangeliggy
made a cult of his own dead relations, but no matter how arrogant,
selfish and greedy they might have been on earth, they wey,

RELIGIONS OF ESCApE

21

presumed to have gone Straight to Heaven, jet-propelled, when

they died. I can remember with what secret, fascinated horror
I once gazed, when I was a child, on the graven image of a
friend's ancestor, a massive old lady stretched out on top of her
vast family tomb, who, I was informed, had died of apoplexy
brought on at table by Overeating; but nothing daunted, she had
reached the bosom of Abraham before the chicken bone she was
gnawing could be removed from her mouth!

The good Protestant was unable to imagine the torment to a
soul, conscious of sin, and rushed, so to speak, into the presence
of God, without the sweet and terrible mercy of purifying fire.
She was also unable to believe that the members of her own family
could need spiritual cauterization, or the mercy of the prayers
that fall into the fires of purgatory like drops of cold water.

Consciousness of sin and of the common responsibility for guilt
unites men, spiritual alms are the hand of love reaching from
end to end of the world, and beyond the world to those who have
died. Awareness of the reality of the common responsibility for
guilt leads to communion between all living men, and between
the living and the dead.

On the contrary, every escape mechanism, every denial of
guilt, and particularly every conviction of personal righteousness,
leads to exclusions, to a narrowing down of compassion, to spirit- _
ual cliques, and parochialism.

In that serene atmosphere of security, of beautiful manners,
of church bells ringing across green meadows, of grey spires
pointing to skies of delicate blue, of quiet graveyards, reassuring
the living from every mossy headstone that all their dead were
“Safe in the arms of Jesus,” religion blossomed in the peace that
this world gives, and from it, a little flowering offshoot, there
blossomed another escape, namely the sentimentalized, sugary
conception of the human character of Christ. The unreal Christ of
the lace-bordered texts, waved hair and beard, white robes and
white sheep. A whole conception of Christ could hardly have
grown out of the polite and gentle piety that prevailed, and
freedom to interpret the Scriptures which every individual was
allowed resulted in freedom to ignore the less congenial passages,

22 GUILT

such as the whipping of the traders in the temple, and Christ’s
teaching on the subject of Hell. A writer of the time, Samuel
Butler, described a typical congregation as one “that would be
equally horrified at hearing the Christian Religion doubted, and
at seeing it practised.”

I have been describing what I have called the mainstream
flowing out of the Reformation. What of those who could not stay
in it, the unmistakably sinful who could not deceive either them-
selves or their neighbours about their state, and the souls of
intenser spirituality? Take the black sheep first. One result of the
loss of the sense of sin was the division of the flock, separating the
black sheep from the white, while forgetting the divine Shepherd’s
declared preference for the black. To this day we hear people
say “I am not good enough to go to church.” They are the spiritual
descendants of those Protestants who were simply not able to feel
good. There were many such people, who gave up going to church
or any other public worship. There were others who not only did
not feel good, but felt positively bad, they were conscious of
some definite grave sin, and felt that to take the Communion in
these circumstances would be very wrong. They knew of no way
to know they were absolved from the sin, so they too simply
drifted away from their one conscious contact with God. There
were some among the latter who entertained the curious idea that
a long lapse of time automatically absolved sin. But usually before
long enough time had passed, their faith had faded into fainter
colours than their sin had done, and they never resumed the
practice of their religion. What then became of them? Either they
became completely de-spiritualized and materialistic, or they
resorted to one of the many escape mechanisms outside of
religion, which will be described in the chapter on Mechanisms
of Escape, or, and this most frequently, they drifted into the
great colourless mediocracy, who profess what is called “my own
religion.”

There have been countless new religions started, as by John
Wesley, with the most magnificent spiritual ideals, but for want
of the three elements in Catholic life already described, they have
tended to revert to the mainstream atmosphere. And beside

RELIGIONS OF ESCAPE 23

these, what of the spiritually sensitive? One of the results of the
Protestant religion, from its beginning until now, has been a
spate of reactions, putting all the stress on man’s guilt and none
on God’s love. It is characteristic of all these sects that the often
overwhelming sense of guilt is dislocated, removed from its real
cause, sin, to some other cause altogether.

For example, puritanical sects attach more guilt to pleasure
than to sin, and lay a great burden of guilt onto innocent recrea-
tions, such as a game of cards on a Sunday. Some such sects pro-
ject their feeling of guilt onto everything that is either gay or
beautiful, especially that quality which has the lovely little lilting
name “levity” and teases pomposity and solemnity. Everything
lighthearted comes under the censure, and even everything enter-
taining: dancing, wearing pretty clothes or trinkets, curling the
hair, reading fiction, going to the theatre, and hearty laughter!

The worship of God itself must be stripped of every outward
beauty, even the offering of flowers in church for his glory who
made the flowers.

Again the two elements that are always found in attempts to
escape from the real cause of guilt appear, separatism or ex-
clusiveness, and a false conception of God—this time a travesty
of God yet more deplorable than the picture of the sentimental
human Christ, a dour censorious God, condemning his children
for delighting in the loveliness of his own gifts to them!

Countless men and women have abandoned religion altogether
because this conception of God overshadowed their childhood and
adolescence.

One of the most tragic reactions to the deficient sense of per-
sonal sinfulness that has flowed out of the Reformation is the
Salvation Army. Tragic because it is a body inspired by such
great love, in which not only the guilt of personal sin is pro-
foundly felt but responsibility for the world’s suffering too, but
once again the answer is lost, and just as the old type of Protestant
depended on feeling good to be saved, the Salvationist depends
upon feeling bad to be saved; and feeling good or bad, once
spiritual adolescence passes, can usually only be induced by orgies
of emotional stimulation, hymn-singing, exhortation, clapping

24 GUILT

hands, beating drums and so on, all too often resulting in
emotional excitement of the kind that is followed by spiritual
hangovers, moral lapses, and nervous exhaustion.

Significantly towards the turn of the century Christian Science
appeared. Without any reflection on the sincerity of its inventor,
it is easy to see that this would have given considerable satisfac-
tion to Satan. He had succeeded for at least three centuries in
making the majority of men abuse almost every gift that God had
given to them. They had used science more often to destroy the
souls and bodies of men than to benefit them. They had made
work, not a thing of joy and redemption as it could have been
made, but a treadmill that had broken the spirit of multitudes.
They had almost all lost sight of the true God and had either
distorted conceptions of him or none at all. The scene was set
for the centuries of sin and guilt to break out in visible suffering
all over the world, like a great rash of evil.

There was one thing, however, that could frustrate Satan, undo
his plan and break up his work of centuries, and that was if,
instead of being completely demoralized and dragged down into
despair by the suffering that was about to break out, man should
suddenly go into reverse, and use it for good.

How excellent then, from his point of view, that just now a new
religion of escape should seduce hundreds of thousands of people
to the astonishing belief that there is no such thing as suffering!
No evil, no body, no sickness or pain, or hunger or thirst—and
even no death!

It has always been to Satan’s advantage that people should
not believe in himself, and what could better serve this end,
besides causing a wholesale waste of suffering as a means of re-
demption, than making them believe that there is no such thing as
suffering?

It is a bewildering fact that there were vast numbers of people
who became convinced that they had no body; but there were,
and there still are. It is more bewildering still, that many of them
went on believing that there is no evil, no body, pain or death,
when wars and man’s illimitable cruelty forced them to see people
wounded and dying in their streets, and brought irrefutable re-

RELIGIONS OF ESCAPE 95

ports of multitudinous misery and starvation and mass murders to
them. But most astonishing is the fact that these people are most
convinced of all that they have no bodies, when their own bodies
are racked with pain! The only possible explanation is that
Christian Science offers human beings something which they
want so intensely that they are prepared to violate their reason
to have it. The faith of the Christian Scientist is the limit of wish-
ful thinking, and Christian Science the most transparent religion
of escape. Virtually it teaches: “If there is no guilt, no one has any
responsibility to his fellows for suffering. If there is no suffering,
I cannot suffer; if there is no death, I shall not die.” Here indeed
is a complete expression of fear of responsibility, fear of suffering,
fear of death!

In common with every escape religion and with every escape
mechanism, Christian Science tends to isolate its members from
the world of men and women; the invisible rivers of compassion
which flow between most human creatures do not flow from
Christian Scientists. Even for members of their own church they
have no ordinary sympathy and compassion. What sympathy can
they feel or give for the pain that they deny exists?’ And what
compassion to the bereaved, if they deny the existence of death?
So far as they can, they cut themselves off from the solidarity of
sorrow which comforts and unites other men.

Mary Baker Eddy claimed to have “discovered” Christian
Science in the year 1864. At that time Sigmund Freud was eight
years old—oddly enough, it fell to his lot to start a faith that
would teach that man had a body and no soul, exactly the
opposite to Christian Science, in which man has a soul but no
body.

The really evil thing about Freudianism is the abuses of it
which have made a faith of it and distorted Freud’s theories. It
is true that Freud was a materialist, and his theories material:
this is his limitation. But he believed that he was only dealing with
material things, and with morbid cases. To apply his theories to
the spiritual is ridiculous. Freud himself was a fearless seeker
for truth, and one who often stood alone. Undoubtedly his mis-
takes—especially the profound pessimism that marks his theories

26 GUILT

—have done an immense amount of harm; but he opened the
gate to more human sympathy and hope than any doctor before
him. After all, we should be grateful to the hen that lays the eggs,
even if it is a rather sad, limited little hen, and some of the eggs
are bad.

Freudianism is a religion which has grown from the heart of a
twisted humanity. It would be as unfair to attribute all the dogmas
that are proclaimed as “Freudian” to Sigmund Freud himself, as
it would be to attribute to Cranmer the ingenious technique of
escape that has grown up in the Church of England.

The Freudian faithful, conditioned as they are by generations

of more and more vague and elastic Protestantism, do not ask

to know, let alone to understand, a great deal concerning their
belief; neither would many of them be prepared to face the task
of learning their master’s vocabulary and reading his works. They
are not disturbed, either, by the fact that psychiatrists usually
disagree with one another. After all, the reformed religious have
done the same: so that the ordinary layman can believe or dis-
believe almost what he will, without necessarily being quite sure
what it is: or, which matters more, without being committed by
it to any definite line of conduct in the future.

The average Freudian has no very clear knowledge of what
Freud taught about the “oedipus complex” or “infantile sexuality”;
and though he is familiar enough with “the Ego,” the “Id” might
as well be a harvest bug for all he knows. He is content to accept
as dogma that any persistent feeling of guilt is morbid; and should
it become acute, it should be extracted by a psychiatrist, almost as
easily as an aching tooth can be extracted by a dentist.

Why is it that it is Freudian psychoanalysis, and not the enor-
mously suggestive philosophy of Jung, that has captured the
popular imagination? In the philosophy of Jung there is all the
beauty and terror and dream of mankind—its myths, its fairy
stories, its magicians and its heroes. All its symbols too, water and
light and earth—spiritual rebirth, resurrection, and ever-return-
ing childhood.

In the land into which Jung invites the troubled soul, we walk
in dark primeval forests beside the waters of the living stream of

RELIGIONS OF ESCAPE 27

life, sometimes with its loveliness sparkling in our..eyes, some-
times blindly through great chasms of darkness. Here we meet
those figures of our childhood and our dreams, who deliver us
from the drab material world—Merlin and Aphrodite, the witches
and the gnomes, the immortal little child and the divine Shepherd,
playing eternal music on his reed. To this land there are no
boundaries.

No boundaries: there we have part of the answer: modern man
is eager for boundaries. He prefers to shrink to the limitations and
spiritual frustrations of life offered by Freud, for they offer him
an escape from the responsibility of being guilty; in fact, they even
offer him an escape from the responsibility of being human, for
a soulless man is not a human being. Psychoanalysis, the tech-
nique of Freudianism, claims to help men to know themselves, but
the most frequent result is just the opposite; it is too often a case
of the blind leading the blind, and results in a man ceasing to
know even what a man is.

From ceasing to know what he is like, man has ceused to know
what he is.

We have seen that in his attempts to escape from self-knowl-
edge, man loses his knowledge of God: like Adam he tries to hide |
from God, because in the penetrating light of God he sees himself
as he is. But he cannot really escape from the light of God; he can
only hide his eyes and blind himself to it.

For three hundred years men have been blinding themselves
to God, and with each attempt to escape from guilt their concep-
tion of God has become more negative or more distorted. The re-
sult is, as we have seen, that today the majority of people have
either no conception of God at all, or one that is vague and nega-
tive, or even one that is repellent—: and this is the tragedy of
modern man, because, while he is aware that he is a psycholog-
ical failure and seeks desperately for a remedy, he turns away
from the only remedy that can save him—namely, the response
of his whole being to God. |

He tries to accept a wholly material explanation of himself, be-
cause his misconceptions of God lead him to an instinctive fear

28 GUILT

that any surrender of his mind to him would interfere disastrously
with his life. He feels that contact with God, even if not positively
disastrous, would be depressing.

He cannot persuade himself in his heart of hearts that it is cer-
tain that there is no God. But the subject is so embarrassing that
it has become accepted as “bad taste” even to refer to God in
conversation, and in so far as he can he avoids him in thought.

His vague uneasiness about God, which can never be finally
put to sleep, is overshadowed by the distorted ideas of him so in-
delibly impressed on nearly everyone by the escapist religions—
the sentimental, sweet God who would surely not have created
the tiger, and the dour, vengeful God who would surely not have
created the sparrows.

His own guilt feeling aggravates the difficulty, for even if his
life is blameless by his own standards, the feeling of guilt will
waken in him, as it does in everyone; and because it is a feeling of
anxiety and fear and uneasiness generally, it will increase the
sense of being somehow in danger from, and being watched by, a
vengeful and all-powerful Being. Thus through the unhappiness
and confusion of his own blind and unexamined feelings, he at
once fosters and represses a tragic misconception of God.

Since the majority of people have hardly used their spiritual
functions at all, the idea of self-discipline or the least degree of
austerity is irksome; in the matter of temptation, even when it is
known to be temptation, they have for so long taken the line of
least resistance that any other line seems unthinkable.

While he wants to live fully and to be a complete human being,
man does not know that God is the Source of Life, and that the
fullness of his own human life depends wholly on his response
- to God. He does not know that in the uncreated Light of God,
the drabness of his personality would be changed to rich and
brilliant colour, as everything is coloured when the light of the sun
shines on it. Rather than risk the cost of surrender to God, he for-
goes everything outside the little shell of his materialism—not only
the mysteries of the world of the spirit, but the wholeness and
beauty of the sacramental life of soul and body living in harmony
with God and with all creation.

RELIGIONS OF ESCAPE 29

He is unable to desire God; he cannot conceive of Heaven being
the knowing of God; or desire Heaven, in eternity or now in his
own heart, because its attraction does not compensate at all for
the trouble and possible pain and sacrifice involved in having it,
or for the awful risks and possibilities of the unknown.

He has become like the pitiful old woman in Samuel Butler’s
Way of all Flesh, who, when she is dying, implores the visiting
parson in vain for some hope or comfort in the face of eternity,
and then shocks him by saying, “I can do without the Heaven,
Sir, but I cannot do with the Hell.”

Chapter Iv. MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE

“It is certainly better to know that your worst adversary is right in your
own heart.”—c. c. yunc, “The Fight with the Shadow’?

Mopern Man, having succeeded in blinding himself to the reality
‘of guilt, and lost or numbed his sense of sin, is intent upon rid-
ding himself of the misplaced feeling of guilt. This is as hopeless
an attempt as it would be to cure a malignant growth by treating
the symptoms—for example, by drugging a headache associated
with it, or sitting in a draught to cool the fever. Nevertheless the
ways of escape, like the manifestations of the guilt feeling, are
legion and ingenious, and sometimes they are, for a time, suc-
cessful.

Every one of them reveals an attempt to escape from one, or
all, of three things. They are:

self-knowledge
suffering
responsibility

In the few examples of the inconsistency of the guilt feeling
listed already in the first chapter, the mechanism of escape from
these three things is self-evident, but there is much to be learnt
from a more careful consideration of some of them, and of others
which we meet every day in ourselves and in other people.

A common attempt to escape self-knowledge is the practice of
continually confessing moral lapses to friends. These confessions
are always punctuated by exaggerated expressions of self-disgust,

* From The Listener, November 7, 1946,

80

MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE 81

and go together with a complete absence of any determination to
take practical steps to break off the habits in question.

Just below the surface of deliberate thought, the person indulg-
ing in these confessions reasons thus: “I am not just an ordinary
sensualist; if I were, I should not suffer like this for my pecca-
dillos. Only a sensitive person like myself could suffer such
distress for these things.” Thus he restores his self-esteem by
creating an imaginary, sensitive self who, once more, is “not as
other men,” and at the same time he is paving the way for future
lapses.

There are other ways, too, in which confession, outside sacra-
mental confession, temporarily relieves the sense of guilt, builds
up complacency and paves the way to further sin. The de-
bauches of confessing in company practised by the Oxford Group
go far to explain the marked complacency that is characteristic
of its members.

People who are trying to escape from humiliating self-
knowledge frequently do so by putting on psychological fancy
dress.

Fancy dress helps people to imagine themselves to be like the
type of person they have dressed up as; sometimes even to think
that they are that person. It is the greatest help to the morbidly
self-conscious, especially if it is a costume that hides the face.
I have seen a little man, who-in ordinary life had the disposition
and appearance of a canary, completely transformed by a suit of
armour at a dance, and temporarily changed from his twittering
little self to a reckless gallant, so forward and daring that in a
few hours he complicated his life for months.

The psychological fancy dress worn by the guilty must do more
than the ordinary fancy dress; it must not only give the wearer
confidence and hide what shames him from others; it must also
hide it from himself. It must not only justify his conduct, it must
glorify it. Guilty man is not content merely to excuse himself;
he needs to boast; he craves the support and reassurance of his
fellow men; he wants their flattery and applause, and he wants
it exactly in proportion to his misgiving about himself.

Many a boy, at the most impressionable age, has become a

32 GUILT

thief because he was able to hide the contemptible meanness of
the thief’s life under the fancy dress of a romantic figure in crime.
A hold-up man will see himself as a Dick Turpin in scarlet and
gold, redeemed in his own eyes by an imagined discriminating
chivalry. For those who are wanting in imagination, the cinema
supplies models of crooks and gangsters who, though they ulti-
mately come to grief, to satisfy the vague morality of film
censors, win the public sympathy by their charm, their loyalty
to their own kind, and their qualities of romance and pathos.
The lowest kind of crook, in the film world, is often the man
who keeps the deepest love and loyalty of women.

I once enjoyed the passing friendship of a burglar, who con-
stituted himself my escort through some streets surrounding a
-place where I was working. He declared that those streets were
dangerous; I had only his word for it. He was very large, very
tough, an amateur boxer and an ardent churchgoer, with strong
leanings towards the Roman Catholic Church which were frus-
trated by what he considered her unreasonable insistence upon
restitution as a condition for absolution. He had a little son, a
fragile child whose straight thin body and mop of yellow hair
made him resemble a dandelion, whom he meant to bring up in
his own way of life.

This man justified himself by the stock excuse of burglars gen-
erally, that the burglar’s trade is as, honest as that of the banker
or the stockbroker. He glorified himself by saying that it needed
far more courage. In fact, his fictitious self was a hero. He used
his black mask not only to conceal his identity at work, but to
hide from himself under cover of the romantically brave man.
He had to hide from himself that other man, whose victims were
very often defenceless old ladies, lying in the shallow night sleep
of the very old, as helpless and pitiful as sleeping children. But
those old ladies would never enjoy that quiet sleep again after
his visit. Together with many others who had only read about
him in the newspaper, they would lie, night after night, their
eyes wide open, listening, listening, listening—for someone
breathing, close to them in the darkness.

The immoral woman will often see herself, not as degraded, but

MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE 38

as superior to other people. If she can attain a°real state of
amorality by completely destroying both her conscience and her
fastidiousness, she will regard herself as not only not impure, but
as uniquely pure and innocent, an emancipated human being, free
of all the dirty little restrictions and inhibitions which contami-
nate the mind of the prude.

The adulteress and the ageing wanton each thinks of herself as
an “enchantress”; and if she happens to move in society, she
hides from herself both the sordidness of her present life and the
tragedy of her coming old age by putting on a psychological fancy
dress of one of the famous adulteresses or courtesans who are
remembered as they were at the height of their beauty or charm,
and whose sins are glorified by the vulgarity of their many envi-
ous admirers. Favourites among them are Jeanne du Barry, Ninon
de lEnclos, and Lady Hamilton.

Unctuous piety is a not uncommon fancy dress put on by de-
graded characters—often by those who are very diverse in every
other way. Charles Peace, the most obscene of murderers, wrote
letters of pious exhortation from the condemned cell, and the
father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning pressed his odious emo-
tional demands on his daughter in the role of a deeply religious
and prayerful man.

In the type of scrupulous person capable of torturing herself
about imagined sins while remaining blind to her real sinfulness,
the desire to evade self-knowledge becomes mixed quite obviously
with the desire to get relief from suffering. This is not the same
thing as the desire to avoid suffering, which is more closely
locked up in the attempt to avoid responsibility—the common
burden of suffering resulting from the universal guilt of original
sin, and the never-ceasing burden of self-conquest.

The type of person I have in mind is already suffering, and her
repeated confessions and searchings of her conscience to find,
not what is there, but what is not, are aimed at both keeping her
illusions concerning her own spirituality, and trying to discharge
the suffering of the guilt feeling by giving it a name, attributing
it to some trifling imperfection which she can thus externalize.

84 ° GUILT

The same process is often seen in psychotics who attach their
guilt feeling to something external, such as food, and seek relief by
rejecting it.

The scrupulous pietist has built up an imaginary self in her own
mind—a self quite incapable of crude and ordinary sin. Her ideal
of perfection is based not upon God but upon a sinless self, a
really “impossible she,” who blinds her to all other people. But
in spite of this she feels a continual, aching sense of guilt. Her
examinations of conscience do not reach out from the “impossible
she” to other people; indeed it does not occur to her that her
distress, sometimes amounting to physical symptoms of anxiety,
can be caused by anything less (in her own mind), or anything
else, than a stain on the white robe of her own perfection. Nat-
urally, then, her need for a sin to confess, which she expects each
time to prick the blister and discharge the suffering of feeling
guilty, tends to a search for sins against self, such as impurity;
and in her case, of course, this could not be more than rather
nebulous, vague thoughts or “suggestions.” It is not surprising
that almost immediately after the confession the uneasiness re-

turns, and she then questions the confession itself, and returns

as often as the confessor will allow, to confess the last confession.

It is always the sins against self which obsess this type of
scrupulous mind—never the sins against God or against other
people. Who has ever known a person of this kind who was tor-
mented by her want of love, by her lack of justice, by such
things as grinding her servants into giving the maximum work
for the minimum wage, or letting others in her family take on all
the drudgery of the home while she resorts to prayer? Or by
condemning others for the sins to which she is not tempted, or
giving a false and repellent idea of religion to children by her
manner and speech? Again, does anyone afflicted in this way ever
realize or grieve over the insult to God implicit in the anxiety
which doubts his forgiveness, his mercy, his knowledge of her
soul, and which closes her heart against his love? She is really
unaware of her sins against God and against other people, for
the simple reason that God and other people are not real to her.
God, in himself, God as absolute Being, as Goodness, as Father-

MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE 85

hood, is unknown to her. Other people are unknown and unreal
to her. She is too much aware of herself to realize anyone else.

It is in this that the pietist resembles the criminal and the
lunatic. The characteristic-which these three have in common is
unawareness of anyone but themselves.

Egoism consists precisely in unawareness of other people. It is
one of the results of guilt, for it is the result of the unawareness
of God that has been brought about in many by their attempt to
escape from guilt. Only the beauty of God is sufficiently compel-
ling to hold man’s attention and to draw it off from himself. When
he turns away from God and becomes unaware of his presence,
his whole interest turns in and centres on himself and becomes
self-love. If he is obsessed by feelings of guilt, self-pity will
increase his self-love; if he has managed to delude himself and to
numb his sense of guilt and sin, he will become inordinately con-
ceited and easily offended by the least affront to his imagined
splendour, brilliance, uniqueness or charm. He will realize the
existence of others only in so far as they affect himself, by gratify-
ing his sensuality, flattering his rarity, ministering to his needs,
protecting him from life, and so on. He will see no importance
whatever in their lives apart from himself. He will always be
defending his loved self and will go to any lengths to gratify a
wish or to avoid a suffering.

The deliberate murderer who is sane values another human life
very much less than his own gratification. To the person who has
really touched the satanic perfection of self-love, even a small
personal gratification is more important than someone else’s life.

There is an instance related by the pioneer criminologist Lom-
broso, of a child.of eleven, a pretty little Italian girl, who gave
evidence against herself in court without a trace of embarrass-
ment or shame, as if she were reciting a poem. She had murdered
a four-year-old child by pushing her out of a high window. She
first stole the child’s earrings because she wanted to sell them
to buy sweets; then she murdered the child in case she told of the
theft, which would have led to a beating for herself. This child
murderess made no attempt to conceal or deny the murder, and
felt no shame or sorrow for it; she simply could not see that the

386 | GUILT

baby’s life and the parents’ grief mattered more than her own
deprivation of a few sweets or avoidance of a beating.

The notorious Smith, who murdered three wives by drowning
them in a bath, was extremely parsimonious; when the day fixed
in his own mind for the murder was approaching, he began to
bring home small gifts for the intended victim, in order to make

himself dislike her. He always came to dislike anyone who cost

him money, and he wished to feel sufficient dislike to destroy any
feeble pang of pity or remorse which might make it less easy for
him to commit the crime he intended.

We have seen that owing to the loss of the sense of sin and the
loss of the knowledge of God, many people have an “unresolved”
guilt feeling—that is, a feeling of guilt, sometimes amounting to

- an obsession, for which they cannot account in any reasonable

way.

Sometimes this turns to anxiety and to curious obsessions, and
the sufferer will often take fantastic ways to try to discharge the
suffering. He will even seem to court a different suffering in-
volving disaster to himself, to break the unbearable tension. He
will want to be punished and will sometimes commit crimes in
order to be punished; or he will give himself up for crimes com-
mitted by someone else.

In the opinions put forward by psychiatrists as evidence in the
trial of the two boy murderers, Leopold and Loeb, one of them—
Loeb—committed the crime as an indirect suicide. He said during
the examination by psychiatrists while awaiting his trial, that he
had often felt that he ought to commit suicide; and witnesses told
of his having said this long before he was on trial for his life; he
expected to be executed, and went joyfully to serve a life sen-
tence. When he was a young child the daydream most pleasing
to him was that he was in jail, undergoing punishment. Whether
the psychiatrists were right or wrong about Loeb, there can be
no doubt that people give themselves up for murder of which
they are innocent.

In the case of Constance Kent, a girl about fifteen years old
who murdered her little step-brother, but whose guilt was not
discovered until, many years later, she confessed it herself, a

MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE 37

young man who had nothing whatever to do with the crime gave
himself up to the police as the murderer.

The most popularly accepted explanation of these false con-
fessions is the power which suggestion exerts over certain weak-
minded people by means of gruesome and detailed newspaper
reports. There is, however, one outstanding example to show that
neither this nor the “unresolved” guilt feeling is always the true
explanation, and to raise many questions concerning how the
mind works.

This is the example of Hans Strausberg, who confessed to two
of the most terrible murders actually committed by Peter Kiirten,
“the monster of Diisseldorf.”

While the townsfolk of Diisseldorf were in a state of fear and
horror bordering on hysteria because of the presence among
them of an undiscovered murderer whose crimes were multiply-
ing, Hans Strausberg—an epileptic, who was twenty-one years
old but unable to read or write, who was of subnormal intelligence
and could hardly express himself coherently because he had a
cleft palate and a hare-lip—lassoed and attempted to strangle
two young women, but on both occasions the young women
escaped.

Strausberg was arrested and accused not only of the two
attempted murders he had really been guilty of, but also of the
actual murder of a child and a man committed by Peter Kiirten.
He confessed to all four crimes, and gave detailed accounts of
how he committed the two murders as well as the two attempts.
It was only with great difficulty that he was able to make his
speech understood, but he did so, and his descriptions of the
murders were amazingly true to the real facts later confessed
fully by Peter Kiirten.

Hans Strausberg, being completely illiterate and a cretin, was
incapable of reading newspapers, and as he had in fact attempted
two murders, he hardly needed to seek for something to which to
attach his feeling of guilt. Further, evidence which came to light
during his trial and the examinations of the psychiatrists showed
that he was among those who are without any sense of sin and
whose conscience does not disturb them at all. He was found to

88s GUILT

be not responsible for his actions, and committed for life to a
mental asylum.

The Russian writer Dostoievsky, himself obsessed by guilt,
wrote novels springing from his intimate knowledge of men, ac-
quired in the prisons of Siberia. He understood them as few
writers have ever done, because the story of their agony was
graven deep on his own heart and mind. In Crime and Punish-
ment, the story of a poor student, the hero, Raskolnikow, who
commits a murder to try to break down his feelings of humiliation,
does everything he can after the murder to bring suspicion on
himself, and finally confesses; after this he experiences what is
apparently the first feeling of relief and joy in his life, because he
is given a life sentence in Siberia]

Seeking to be punished is not the same thing as self-punish-
ment, which seems to be a complicated drive, in which an attempt
to avoid responsibility, and a fear of punishment to come, are
mixed with an instinct, though a twisted one, for expiation.

An old circus clown who had travelled most of the world in a
menagerie show told me of a lion tamer, his companion for many
years, whose act, planned by himself, was putting his head into
the lion’s mouth every night: he did this to expiate a crime which
he had committed and which was never discovered.

In seeking to avoid responsibility, one of the commonest escape
mechanisms is self-punishment. We have already glimpsed this
in the addicts to pre-party gloom, but it takes countless forms. The
person who punishes herself cannot enjoy pleasure or happiness
because she is haunted by a conscious sense of guilt. She certainly
does not want to give up the good things she has, but she lives in
dread of some catastrophe befalling her by way of punishment—
punishment for what? She will tell you that she is afraid of being
punished for being happy—or rich—or in good health. In reality
she feels, and rightly, that to have managed to avoid doing any-
thing at all by way of shouldering the common responsibility for
guilt puts her in a precarious position. In the last resort what she
fears is death. She may get through without a single personal

MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE 39

sacrifice in this life, but what of the next—if there is one? What
waits in the unknown worlds beyond this?

A frequent form of self-punishment is hypochondria, though it
is complicated by other buried motives. Hypochondria is a
means of obtaining a number of things that the neurotic feels a
bitter need of, and it also satisfies the craving to be punished.
For so long as the patience of the doctors lasts, it does much to
give the poor sufferer the feeling of being protected from death.
With the dread possibilities of the unknown facing her, she calls
the doctor at the first symptom of illness. She can even induce
symptoms to bring him. She receives either his treatment—and
protection—or his assurance that there is nothing wrong with her.
If it is the latter, the relief will be short-lived, as the doctor will go
away. She prefers him to be in continual attendance, and fears
nothing so much as good health.

Of all the attempts to escape personal responsibility for the
suffering of the world and for individual guilt, none is so dan-
gerous as the loss of their own individuality which countless
people seek by identifying themselves with a group: One of the
most persistent miseries that sin has imposed upon men is a sense
of personal insufficiency. This has become more than ever acute
in our own days, because of the huge tidal waves of fear that are
sweeping through the world, filling the individual with dread be-
cause of his helplessness in the face of gathering disaster.

His plight is more terrible because in his flight from guilt he
has lost sight of, or perhaps never seen, how to save himself, and
with himself his fellow men, from what he dreads. Because he is
afraid to look into his own soul, lit up by the searching beam of
the Uncreated Light, he does not realize that the enemy is within
himself. Only in himself can he come to grips with the evil which
threatens to destroy humanity. He is afraid to look inwards, and
so he is aware of little but that which is outside of himself. He
is aware that the threatening tide of evil is always gathering
strength, but not that its relentless and seemingly uncontrollable
force is streaming out of his own heart.

Moreover, that which he refuses to recognize in himself, he

40 GUILT

projects onto others, whom he makes his scapegoats. Everyone
who fails to realize and to come face to face with the enemy in
himself will always seek and always find an enemy outside of
himself.

Most people try to banish the dark side of their nature and of
their individual psyche, to force it out of their consciousness into
the unconscious. We have already seen how diverse are the ways
they use, ranging from scrupulosity to crime.

Jung calls this dark side, which is part of every one of us, “the

- Shadow.” It is the evil in man and his proneness to evil, the
persistent downward lurch in every one of us, the potential as
well as the actual sin which is in us all. “Primitiveness, violence,
cruelty, in short all the powers of darkness.” “The Shadow” is
the result of original sin.

_ If we succeed in banishing our evil side and become unaware
of it, the primitive cruelty and wickedness in our hearts waxes
stronger and stronger out of sight. The beast is preparing for
battle in secret. It is crouching just below the thin surface of con-
sciousness, with talons out, ready to break through and destroy.

The danger is great when we are not in conscious conflict with
ourselves. We must bring the evil out into the light of conscious-
ness, in order that we may meet it on the battlefield of our own
souls.

We are safe only when we are consciously at war within our-
selves.
This is one meaning that we may discover in those paradoxical
words of the Prince of Peace, “I bring not peace but a sword.”
But the danger is not to the individual alone. When a great

many individuals are secretly possessed by forces which they do
: not understand, they are drawn together and united in a curious
__way by the forces they disavow.

There is a mysterious magnetism which unites them, and if they
are organized into a group which identifies itself with an ideal
that replaces the individual's sense of responsibility and his sense
of his own littleness by an inflated idea of the mission and power

MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE 41

of the group, he becomes more and more unaware of the evil in
himself.

When this happens, that evil is multiplied; it is no longer one
man’s “shadow,” but the shadow of millions, all uncontested, all
gathering force, ready to be released as soon as a leader is found
who is himself so possessed by evil that he is the symbol and
personification of the masses.

As the devil driven out of the maniac was liberated in the
Gadarene swine and sent them rushing to their destruction, the
devil that has been liberated from the leader’s soul seizes upon
and liberates “the Shadow” in the souls of the regimented multi-
tude and drives them to their own ultimate destruction.

We have seen this illustrated in the tragedy of Germany. Ger-
man youth, smarting under the humiliation following the war of
1914—demoralized and depressed—was a ready prey to the Nazi
ideology. Lost in the new exhilaration, identified to the point of
insanity with the rightness of the Cause and the idolatry of the
Fuehrer, not one of those young men and women was aware of
the evil within themselves.

As the blonde Hans, with the blue eyes and face of an angel and
the slight smell of carbolic soap, swung along the streets in his
S.S. uniform, exulting in the sacrifice of his personality to the
_ Cause, the forgotten evil in his own soul, uncontested, waxed
stronger and more furious. Straining at the chains that were
already breaking, crouching in the darkness, the beast was ready
to spring.

But the beast was not alone. The multitudinous evil in the
millions was secretly united in an immeasurable force of destruc-
tion, waiting for the signal to break out into the open and plunge
the world into a sea of blood.

The signal came from Hitler, because he was the most inferior
and most irresponsible of them all. He was not the leader or the
‘ oppressor of the German people, but the expression of everything
that was worst in them, which they were repressing in themselves.
This is Jung’s description of Hitler and his relationship to his
people: “With the rest of the world they did not understand

42 GUILT

what Hitler’s significance was: namely, that he was a symbol of
every individual: he was the most prodigious personification of
all human inferiorities. He was a highly incapable, unadapted,
irresponsible, psychopathic individual, full of empty childish
fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or gutter-
snipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of every-
body’s personality, in an overwhelming degree—and this is an-
other reason why they fell for him.”®

It was that intuition of the “rat or guttersnipe” that warned
Hitler that the wild beasts leashed in the darkness were already
too thirsty for blood to be held back until the moment for the
devastation of Europe, and impelled him to let them loose upon

_ the Jews in Germany.

What happened to the Germans yesterday may happen to us
tomorrow. We are creating conditions such as the Germans made
for themselves.

First of all and most dangerous of all, we too repudiate “the
Shadow”; we refuse to see that in each one of us, just below the
brittle surface of consciousness, there is a “Beast of Belsen.” We
prefer to think that those who committed outrages of cruelty on
human beings in Belsen, Auschwitz, Lublin, Mauthausen and
Ravensbriick were abnormal people, monsters suffering from some
congenital psychopathic enormity; but this is not so. The most
revealing finding at the trials of the “war criminals” was that they
were, with very few exceptions, sane, normal people, people like
you and me.

They did what we are doing; instead of fighting the evil in
themselves and so preventing the collective force of evil from
gathering, they escaped into the complacency and the false se-
curity of identification with a group—not that rightful tendency
to associate with others, grounded in man’s nature as a social
being, whereby the individual personality is enriched, but a flee-
ing from the burden of being oneself.

Right through every stratum of society this tendency prevails
here. Men and women hand themselves over willingly to be
crowded together and controlled by forces outside themselves in

*C. G. Jung, “The Fight with the Shadow.”

MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE 43

industry; they lose sight of their helplessness before-the rising tide
of want and poverty. They even allow their pleasure to be or-
ganized for them, and herd together in huge groups to spend their
holidays in camps, where every hour of the day is arranged for
them.

Religious people form themselves into groups in which, through
over-activity that is often “much ado about nothing,” and the
feeling that they belong to a great and vital force of righteousness
with a mission to lead and dominate others, they lose the feeling
of personal guilt and of insufficiency.

Thus by losing his individuality, in order to rid himself of his
first responsibility—namely, to fight the evil in himself—man adds
a sinister aspect to personal guilt, not only for the individual con-—
cerned, but for mankind as a whole.

Psychologists relate neurosis of many kinds to “unresolved
feelings of guilt.”

Although this is a book about normal people, we cannot ignore
those who are considered abnormal, because not only, as I have
already said, do we see in them the normal under a magnifying
glass, but there are psychotic people and even insane people who
seem to be chosen to suffer some typical universal suffering of
our age, in an intensified form; and there may well be saints
among them, to whom we owe an incalculable debt, and at the
very worst they are warnings to us and scapegoats for us all.

All these neurotic obsessions can be traced to a compulsion to
try to be rid of the suffering of an unbearable tension or unhap-
piness, but as I shall explain in the chapter called “The Homing
Toad,” I believe that they have also another and more far-reaching
significance.

Some of these obsessions are: constantly washing the hands:
a mania for counting—counting the words spoken, the steps taken
in walking, the lines on the paving stones, the stairs, and indeed
everything that can be counted: repeated gestures, and some-
times the queerest antics, such as touching every lamppost in the
street. Anxiety, attributed to the same cause, leads people to open
and re-seal their letters over and over again lest they be in the

44 GUILT

wrong envelopes; to write the same sentence literally hundreds of
times; to go back over and over again to see if they have turned
off the light; to become the victims of unreasonable fears, and so
on.

Dr. Russell Brain describes many of the guilt complexes of
writers in an article published in the British Medical Journal,
called “Authors and Psychopathics.” Samuel Johnson, he tells us,
whirled, twisted and performed extraordinary antics with his
hands and feet, especially when crossing the threshold of a door,
and he had the habit of whistling and blowing and counting
his steps, touching posts in the street, and—perhaps most dis-
concerting of all for his friends—of stretching out his arm with a
full cup of tea in his hand, in every direction.

It is not only unresolved guilt to which the individual cannot
attribute the cause, that may result in abnormality. Guilt for
which the cause is all too well realized by the sufferer may also
result in neurosis and morbidity, because he is unable or unwilling
to cope with the situation.

The poet John Donne is an example of this. A Catholic apostate

_ whose veins ran crimson with martyrs’ blood, he became Protes-

tant Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then grew obsessed—
literally obsessed—by thoughts of death and the decomposition
of the body. The statue of him in St. Paul’s Cathedral is a monu-
ment to his guilt.

In the article quoted above, Dr. Brain tells how this statue was
made; having consented to have a monument made of himself for
his Cathedral, Donne had an urn made to fit his body, and
wrapped in his winding-sheet he stood on it, posing as his own
corpse. Thus it was he caused an artist to draw him for the
monument. The drawing, when completed, he had placed by his
bedside and gazed on it until the hour of his death.

Donne expressed all too cruelly his own anguish, and with it
the anguish of all guilty men who do not know, or will not take,
the remedy for guilt, in one sentence: “Any man’s death
diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Chapter V. THE HOMING TOAD

“For those who offend me are also very close to me, though against
their will.” ——REVELATION TO ST. TERESA OF AVILA

To TELL the story of human guilt would be to tell the story of
mankind through all the ages of creation until now, but all
through that history from the very beginning until now man’s
reactions to guilt and his attempts to escape have been consistent,
and have followed the pattern that they follow today. |

Many people do not believe the story of Adam and Eve and the
first sin, but it seems to me difficult to disbelieve a story in which
human beings are so true to the psychological pattern that is
recognizable in every kind of person today. .

The immediate instinct following their awareness of their guilt
_ was to hide themselves from themselves, to put on fancy dress:

and then, even when they had done this, they must hide from
God.

They were afraid of the light of God because they were naked,
because they could not help seeing themselves in that penetrating
light as they really were, as they had become now: and therefore
the Presence of God, which until now was the source of their joy,
was painful to them.

The curious thing is that they were not afraid of God because
they had disobeyed him, but because they knew that something
had gone wrong with their human nature as a result, and they
could no longer endure self-knowledge in God’s presence. They
tried to hide from themselves and from one another. They found
the truth about themselves confusing enough in their own com-
pany; in the presence of God they found it intolerable. Adam did
not answer the voice of God calling to him in the cool of the day

45

46 : GUILT

by saying, “I was afraid because I had disobeyed you,” but “I
heard thy voice in the garden, and I was ara because I was
naked and I hid myself.”

But even so short a time ago as the davai of that day in Eden,
walking in the loveliness of the light of God, Adam and Eve had
been naked, and they were not troubled by the fact. “And they
were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

Human nature is made in God’s image; only when it has been
made in a sense unnatural by sin, so that concupiscence has in-
fected it with its subtle poison, does it become that of which man
is ashamed before God.

This applies to everything in human nature, not only, as count-
less people imagine, to sex; but undoubtedly there was a profound .
psychological effect upon the natural love of man and woman
too, and the emotions woven into this love became split. The order
of God’s law no longer held man in the perfect balance and the
unity within himself which made his expression of love a simple,
complete act of pure joy, controlled by his own will. Human
nature was disintegrated by the first sin, and instead of being, as
Satan had promised, more like God, it was less like God, for in its
every expression it had lost its wholeness, Inevitably this expres-
sion, life-giving love—which is the most Godlike of all—was com-
plicated most of all.

The first sin was, above all else, a fearful abuse of the gift God
gave to man by which alone he was able to love, namely free-will.
The result of the sin was that he was no longer able to use his
will freely, he became the slave of his impulses and appetites and
the use of his will must henceforth involve a struggle with them
and with himself.

Probably, like a sign of what had happened inwardly, which
would take many generations for man to understand, came the
first matrimonial quarrel, the first disagreement and antagonism
between man and wife who were made to be one flesh. For it is
difficult to suppose that at least a little coldness did not result
from Adam’s prompt shifting of responsibility onto Evel “The
woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree
and I did eat.”

$s
THE HOMING TOAD 47

To this day sexual love is split in its expression. It is complicated
by conflicting elements of love and hate, sadism and masochism.
There is a kind of schizophrenia of sex, which many people now
accept as being “natural”; but, as we shall see, sex requires
the unifying principle of redemption to restore it to man’s true
nature, and to make it once more the supreme expression of
human love.®

Cain followed the same pattern as Adam. Because he had
murdered his brother he could not endure to remain in the
presence of God; but neither could he face the hardship of being
a vagabond on the earth that would yield nothing to him, and the
fear of being murdered in his turn by other men. The wonderful
touch of mercy following his sin is nearly always ignored by those
who tell Cain’s story today, and we are told he was “branded” as
if it were to add to his shame by pointing him out.as a murderer.
In truth God put a mark on him to protect him.

“And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than
I can bear. Behold thou hast driven me out this day from the face
of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a
fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass
that everyone that findeth me shall slay me. -

“And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth
Cain, vengence shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set
a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

“And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord. . . .” (Gen.
413-16)

There is not only a pattern running consistently all through
man’s reaction to his guilt, but there is also an equally consistent
pattern in God's reaction to it, which begins with Adam and per-
sists all through time to this day. It is an attitude of the tenderest
fatherhood, and the first men in spite of their guilt still knew God
well enough to know this. Note that it was not of God’s vengeance
that Cain was afraid; he rather turned to him for mercy, as if he

felt confident that he would ease the punishment that he could
not bear: what he really feared was what his fellow men would
do to him: “... and it shall come to pass that everyone that findeth

® See Chapter XVIII, “The Measure of Joy.”

48 GUILT
me shall slay me”—and God at once brands Cain, not to scar him

as a murderer, but to set the seal of his own extraordinary pro-
tecting love on him. No one, seeing that mark, could kill Cain

unless they liked to risk the vengeance of God.

Before that, what a significant little detail reveals God’s tender-
ness to Adam and Eve. He did not leave them naked or cowering
away from him in their fancy dress of fig leaves, but he clothed
them himself: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God
make coats of skins, and clothed them” (Gen. 3.21).

The story of man’s wickedness and God’s mercy goes on like
this. When men had become wicked, “thinking only evil thoughts,”
and the flood came, the Ark was given to Noah and his family and

. the animals; and when the flood subsided, God filled the sky with

the lovely sign of the rainbow—who but God would give a rain-
bow with his forgiveness! Again and again, the Israelites, who
were to give us Christ, were forgiven and given lovely tokens of
forgiveness when they had sinned. Even those punishments which
God’s love must give are inflicted on man by his own hand, he
brings them on himself; only love and mercy come straight from
God’s hand.

Death, the most terrible punishment for sin, was brought into
the world by man, and the first man to die died by a man’s hand.
The first death was murder.

Mercy upon mercy answers sin upon sin, and Christ is the
complete mercy, which cannot be surpassed. We shall see a little
further on how completely and how exactly Christ is the answer
to Adam.

As to Satan, who is the ultimate cause of all guilt, and who
first induced a woman to sin, God answers him with a woman:
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman” (Gen. 3.15).
This woman is the Mother of Christ, who already stands before
God, with the head of the serpent crushed under her foot.

There is one remarkable characteristic of human nature which
seems to me to bear some relationship to the brand of Cain, the
mark of mercy which shows that man, evil though he is, is pro-

tected by God.

THE HOMING TOAD 49°

In the heart of every fallen man there dwells a homing toad.

Toads are not very popular animals, except perhaps with
witches; on the whole men think of them as repulsively ugly,
squat, square, horny, coarse and altogether, in spite of the fact
that they have beautiful eyes, unattractive. Superstitious people,
presumably because of the poor toad’s connection with witch-
craft, think he is unlucky and spit on the ground when they see
him. But there is one kind of toad (incidentally, he is the com-
monest kind, the large brown fellow we find under big stones in
the garden) who is a most moving animal, as beautiful as he is
grotesque, and for me at all events a symbol of mankind: the
homing toad.

This toad has an undefeatable drive in him to go back to his
home: he can be taken as far away from it as anyone is cruel
enough to take him, and he always gets back. Some have taken a
homing toad fifty miles from his home, and after marking him in
order to be sure of his identity, have let him go, and after weeks
he has turned up at home, dusty from many hot dry roads, thin,
nearly dead from exhaustion, but back again in his own home,
where mercifully he recovers, fills out, becomes a plump happy
toad again and falls into a beautiful beatific sleep under his old
home stone.

Now man, however evil he becomes, however twisted and
grotesque—however far away guilt takes him from God, from his
home, the environment in which he can regain the true shape of
his, manhood—always reveals the struggle, innate in him, to get
back. He really wants to be in the Light of God, in his proper
home, and even in the twists and contortions that he goes through
in his abnormalities, even in his insanities, it is obvious that he is
striving without his knowledge, even without his will, to get back.

In every manifestation of his mind working in ignorance—but
sincerely—man shows his desire for God’s light. In all his psy-
chological mistakes and oddities he shows a wish to be what God
wants him to be, though he is often showing it unconsciously and
by making his pseudo-self into a caricature of his real, God-made
self.

There are certain things man was created to be, certain condi-

50 GUILT

tions for being restored to the original pattern which have come

about through his redemption and his oneness with Christ; under
all his confusion and folly, something in him strains and agonizes
towards those things and tries to fulfill those conditions.

There is evil beyond all words in every man, but against that
evil there is persistent good, which makes him like his symbol in
the Homing Toad, lovable even when he is grotesque. It is as well
to list some of these signs of the Homing Toad briefly here; they
will be discussed more fully as we go on, and probably the reader
will see others that I have not perceived; but the more they are
kept in mind in discussing some of the miseries of human nature,
the more hopeful one is able to feel for mankind.

First of all, the instinct to hide, with which we can include
psychological fancy dress and many forms of self-delusion. It is
observable that people assume a disguise which gives good points
to the character they assume, though sometimes if those who are
to be impressed by the character belong to a set that is degenerate
or dishonest, they may wish to seem worse than they are in the
general make-up. But the thief will have on the hero’s fancy dress,
the immoral woman will clothe herself in the fiction that immoral
women are great-hearted, the degenerate will easily put on the
self-delusion that he is anti-social because he is supersensitive, or
more afflicted by social injustice than other men. It is the com-

monest thing in the world for the man who is jaundiced by envy _.

to suppose that he is a social reformer, or the intellectual who has
become déclassé and is a misfit in every class to find a virtue in
his own class-hatred. The scrupulous woman in her fancy dress
of angelic perfection cannot bear to know the hard kernel of her
own heart that is so far from the the likeness of eternal Love.

All of them are crying out in a most incongruous, involuntary
chorus—but a chorus all the same—“Thank God we are not as
other men.”

Deep in the heart of man there is a longing to be as God created
him: to be a man made in the pattern of Christ. St. Paul speaks of
“putting on Christ.” That is man’s real need, to “put on Christ”
like a garment, covering himself not with a disguise, a falsehood, -
but with the humanity of Christ, for which he was made.

THE HOMING TOAD 51

Guilty man cannot face himself as he is. In spite of the fact that
this is an age in which introspection has become almost a stience,
it is also an age in which few men dare to face themselves and
to see themselves as they are. Consequently nearly everyone has
made a fictitious self, and in contemplating this, he is able to for-
get “what manner of man he is.”

This desire to escape from self-knowledge is, like the desire to
escape from suffering, a symptom of self-love, and it is interesting
to observe that twisted as he is, man cannot love himself as he
really is. Bad though he is, he cannot love himself in his badness,

.he must blind himself to it and try to love the false self of his
imagination. It is difficult to imagine a situation so far removed
from reality as this; man whose self-love compels him to love a
self that is not real.

Closely allied to the “fancy-dress” escape is the daydream which
invades reality. This is very common. Orphans, illegitimate
children, sometimes adopted children, and even children whose
real parents fail to satisfy some psychological need in them, or
whose inflation none could satisfy, have daydreams that they are
the children of titled or royal people. The answer is that they

are children of the King of Kings. I remember a little orphan
girl’/in a slum whose daydream was that she was a queen’s
daughter. When she was brought into the Catholic Faith and
saw the statue of Our Lady, her Mother, Crowned Queen of
Heaven, her dream was realized and translated into reality which
transformed her life,

Man’s patent longing for reassurance, for encouragement and
applause from others, and his attempts to lose his individuality in
a group, have an answer—far transcending any natural solidarity
—in the communion of saints, the oneness of the Body of Christ
in his Church. This is a oneness that is complete and carries man

along in its stream of life, but more intensely because of his in-
dividuality, his self in communion with all other men. In it he has —
not only the encouragement of others, or anything so shallow as .
their flattery, he has the power of their sanctity and their love; it
belongs to him, and his belongs to them.

The destructive drive towards self-punishment is a perversion

52 GUILT

of the Christ-given instinct for voluntary suffering and penance,
and the life of the hypochondriac and the life of Christian
austerity have much in common outwardly, though one drives
from, and the other to, God.

The morbid wish to confess and to be reassured or exonerated
in vice points to a necessity that God has given to man, Sacramen-
tal Confession and Absolution.

The curious symptoms of guilt such as hand-washing and
symbolic gestures of many kinds (the need for repetition, and so
on) have their answer in ritual, with its ceremonial and symbolical
hand-washing, its repeated words, movements and gestures, all
deeply effective in human consciousness, and able to do in reality
. for man those mysterious things he tries in vain to do for himself
by obsessional acts, remnants of magic and superstition, which
become his torment. The astonishing mania, so common in neu-
rotic people and even in some who are not neurotic, for counting
and being ruled by numbers is connected with the need in man’s
soul for order, for mathematical precision and balance, which is
something that dominates well-balanced, integrated personalities
too continuously for them to be aware of it at all, though they are
aware of its creative effects.

There is a tendency which is unlike counting, but really more
closely related to it than is obvious: this is the wish or need to be
swamped, to be lost, carried away by something stronger than
one’s own will, or one’s own self. It shows itself in many ways—in
drunkenness, lust, passions of anger, mob emotion, in religious
hysteria, especially group hysteria with such practices as “testify-
ing” and “conversion.” It has some outlet in singing, especially
hymn singing and community singing, and is one reason why
several people when they are drunk together, usually sing and
often sing and dance.

There is an answer to this; man was made to be caught up into
the immensity of the Life of God, of the Blessed Trinity, the Life
which is the cause of all other life and power. In God, man’s
individuality is not swamped and submerged, but it is marvel-
lously released from its limitations, set free in the infinite life of
Love and bore along on its eternal torrents of beauty.

THE HOMING TOAD 53

Our life in God is the greatest of all mysteries, and here we
recognize the Homing Toad again—in the pitiful madness which
can lead a man to think himself Christ by his own virtue, a new
messiah with a new message, or simply God. As the whole object
of this book is to show that it is man’s destiny to be “a Christ,” it
will be enough to quote here a definition which puts as clearly
as possible in exactly what our otherness from Christ consists. -

“The difference between the generation of God the Son and
our generation from the Father lies in this, that the Son radiates
from the Father from all eternity by necessity of his nature, while
wevare lifted into the mysteries of this endless life stream only by
a free act of God’s overpowering love.”*®

No wonder the Homing Toad triumphs in man, dusty and
pathetic though his triumph is!

No wonder man wants to be greater, holier, purer, more super-
natural, more beautiful, more potent, more lovable and more
loving, than he feels himself to be in his secret heart.

No wonder that he longs to lose the.sense of his limitations and
his slavery and impotence in immensity, to flood himself out of
consciousness if necessary.

No wonder that in the midst of his sins, his confused glimpses of
Heaven torment him, and yet draw him as irresistibly as a strong
current in deep water.

Surely there can be few if any, honest men and women who
have the smallest vestige of self-knowledge, who have not, at some
secret moment in their life, echoed from the depths of their soul
the poignant cry of the poet Rimbaud, whose youth was a “Season
in Hell.”

“This moment of wakefulness has given me the vision of purity.
The mind leads one towards God. Heartrending Calamity.”

® Julius Tyciak, Life in Christ, p. 22.

Chapter Vi. CONFESSION

Nihil aliud sumus quam voluntates: “We are nothing else but wills.”
—ST. AUGUSTINE

“But though my will is not yet free from self interest, I give it to thee
freely. For I have proved by long experience how much I have gained
by leaving it freely in thy hand.”—st. TERESA OF AVILA®

WE HAVE SEEN that the means by which relief from feelings of
guilt is most often sought is self-accusation and confession—a
confession sometimes of real and sometimes of imaginary guilt.
We have seen too how diverse are the people who come under
this curious compulsion, ranging from the morally depraved to
the timidly pious. There can be no doubt that the compulsion to
confess is rooted in a real necessity of human nature, and ‘is.a
manifestation of the Homing Toad struggling to get back to his
own place of happiness.

Nevertheless, outside of sacramental confession, confessing ages
not bring lasting relief. In fact confession and self-accusation,
used. to escape from the suffering of the feeling of guilt, disin-
tegrate and destroy personality. When it is habitual, as with those
who confess all their moral lapses to their friends, it has the effect
of weakening the will more and more, until ultimately the whole
character crumbles.

It is equally true that all the means used to escape from guilt
destroy personality, because they are all acts of self-love. Every
attempt to avoid the responsibility for guilt is an attempt at self-
protection, self-delusion, self-gratification, or self-aggrandisement.

The man who fosters self-love is indeed his own executioner,
for self-love grows like fungus in a dark, damp place, and the

* Trans. E. Allison Peers.

54

CONFESSION | 55
bigger it becomes, the smaller is that which causes suffering to the
one who fosters it. The more precious a man supposes himself to
be, the more convinced does he become that he is beset by dan-
gers on every side. There are those in mental institutions who
think that they are made of glass that will be shattered at a touch.
In the same way, the more important a man supposes himself to
be, the quicker he is to see slights and insults in unintended
trifles, and the more a man pities himself, the more easily he will
be bruised by the blows of fate that glance off less self-centred
people.

--Fifé more a man loves himself, the more inordinately he will
crave to be loved, and the less loved he will be, and, still more
tragic for him, the less capable will he be of loving anyone else
but himself.

It is not surprising, then, that when the compulsion to confess
and to, make accusations against the self is inspired by self-love,
though it may be disguised self-love, it brings not relief or healing,
but more and more distress and ultimately a collapse of the whole
personality.

Yet confession itself is something that is vital to man’s hap-
_. piness, and it is an essential part of the supreme remedy for real
guilt which has been given to man by God: the Sacrament of
Penance, the sacrament which is nearly always spoken of simply
as “Confession.” . |

Outside the Catholic Church there are few people who do not
cherish wholly mistaken ideas about what sacramental confession
is. Many think that it is a substitute for psychoanalysis and that
Catholics use it for the same purpose for which psychoanalysis
_ is often used, namely to rid themselves of the feeling of guilt, the
' reality of guilt being something which many people fail to recog-
nize. If this were true, those egocentrically scrupulous people
already described, who are driven by self-love and vanity to tor-
turing introversion and repeated confessions in search of relief,
would all be cured, or at least changed to the extent that medical
treatment could change them.

. Psychoanalysis and sacramental confession are two completely
different things.

56 GUILT

Psychiatry is an experimental science for the treatment of
mental, nervous and functional disorder. A psychiatrist who
approaches a human being reverently as a person, a whole human
being who is both soul and body, and not merely an intricate

assembly of materials or a frustrated sexual urge, has a humble |

and yet magnificent service to offer in simplifying man’s response
to grace.

Man is made in the image and likeness of God; even in his
physical nature he bears the imprint of God. When he is true to
the pattern that his human nature is created in, there is the bal-
ance and harmony, the order and rhythm within him that is in
all created things, and his balanced personality is the ordinary
channel through which grace can flow most easily. A disturbance
in the working of the mind or body—such, for example, as the
mind’s being so flooded by emotion as to hinder the judgment of
the intellect or the free choice of the will—can put obstacles in
the way of grace, though it is not inevitable that it should.

Psychological illness can be the means to sanctity as much as
any other illness can be, but also, in common with all other chronic
and painful illness, it can be demoralizing and destructive to the
soul.

It is the work of the psychiatrist to restore an unbalanced, dis-
turbed personality to the sweetness of order that is true to human

nature, and so to prepare the whole man for the inflowing of ©

grace. The ideal psychiatrist is a St. John the Baptist in the wild-
erness of the modern world, whose mission is to “prepare the way
of the Lord, make straight his paths.”

Sometimes a priest who recognizes that one of his penitents is

neurotic or bordering on neurosis will advise him to seek the help
of a psychiatrist, and with healthy results, but there are cases
which psychiatrists fail to help. The result depends largely on the
skill and the personality of the analyst, but sometimes the greatest
skill and the most persuasive and sympathetic personality are
unavailing to remove or mitigate the patient’s mental suffering, or
even to diagnose it correctly.

The Sacrament of Penance has a purpose wholly different from
that of psychiatry and one which far transcends it. It is one too

cb /p gthge dle a ctgpeai > aieairialin rename siaeeai aman er elms), arte Se

CONFESSION 57

which can never fail unless the penitent himself deliberately
frustrates it by an act of sacrilege.

It is not limited to a certain kind of person, but is for every one;
it does not depend on the personality or the skill of the priest;
it fulfills its purpose whether he is a man of the deepest under-
standing of human nature or of none at all.

It is not something experimental which may or may not be
effective in a given case, but something absolutely certain which
will be effective in every case. It is never an experiment; it is
always a miracle.
~ The purpose of sacramental confession is atonement—at-one-
ment—with God. What happens in Confession is that man, who
has separated himself from God, becomes one with him again. It
is an unimaginable impact of love between God and man in which
Christ gives himself to the sinner. To the soul that is dead in sin,
Christ’s life flows back, and in that sinner’s life Christ rises again
from death. To the soul that is devitalized and nerveless from
habitual sins of weakness, Christ gives an increase of his life,
flooding the soul with his vitality and love and SHUEE it as he
changed the water into wine at Cana.

The Sacrament of Penance is the sacrament of joy. It is not only
the sacrament of joy for the sinner who returns to God and is
restored to life and made one with Christ, but (and this is a
mystery far beyond any joy or glory of man’s) it is also a sacra-
ment of joy for the eternal Father. He rejoices as the father of the
- Prodigal Son rejoiced. He sees in the Christ-redeemed sinner,
risen from the death of sin and living again with Christ’s life, his
only beloved Son coming back to him, clothed in thé red robes of
his Passion.

The sacrament is not intended to be, and is not, a form of heal-
ing for mental or nervous disorder, though incidentally it may
‘ sometimes have that effect, as well as its primary one of removing
the guilt that has come between God and man, and making them
one. Just as the touch of Christ’s hand or of the hem of his garment
sometimes healed the physically sick on earth, his touch in
Confession may sometimes heal the sick mind miraculously. Ex-
treme Unction, the sacrament for the dying, sometimes restores

58 GUILT

the dying to health; but the Sacrament of Penance will always do
very much more for the incurable neurotic than remove his
mental suffering. It will, while forgiving whatever sin he has
really committed, change the suffering of his mind into the
suffering of Christ's mind, infusing into it the redeeming power
of his suffering.

By restoring his own life to man in the confessional, Christ
changes man’s heart, which is constricted by self-love, to his own
heart, which expands to include the whole world in his love. To
the suffering mind of the neurotic he will give his own suffering—
in his temptation, in his contact with Satan, in his failure to make
himself understood, in his knowledge that his love was rejected,
in his fear and feeling of guilt in Gethsemane, in the humiliation
of his nakedness on Calvary, in his utter loneliness and his sense
of having been forsaken by God on the Cross.

The purpose of sacramental Confession is to remove sin, not
to remove suffering, though sometimes it does that too. But always
it does something far more, and for all suffering, not only psycho-
logical suffering: it gives it a meaning, a purpose, and a power.
It changes it from being destructive to being creative. By giving
Christ’s life, the sacrament gives the redeeming, healing power
of Christ’s love to the suffering that the forgiven sinner must
experience.

For ego-neurosis, the disease of self-love, the sacrament
contains everything necessary for a cure. This is not surprising,
because this great remedy for guilt is not something which man
has discovered, but something given to him by divine Wisdom, by

‘him who “knows what is in man’s heart.”

When self-love is a deliberate choice for which someone is fully »
responsible because he knows what he is choosing, and knows also
what he is rejecting, it is quite simply a sin; but there are many .
people in whom self-love is a psychological illness of which they
are not conscious and which, has taken possession of them
through no fault of their own.

Early circumstances, to give only one example, may have
started the disease in people before the age of reason was reached,

CONFESSION 59

and it may have grown with them and in them, buried so deep
that they were never aware of the real cause of their suffering.

A child who has been treated cruelly and so put on the
defensive may grow up with an attitude of self-protection that
absorbs him to the exclusion of all else; a child who has, on the
other hand, been spoilt and who has not been taught to know
God may have had it instilled into him that he is the centre of the
universe, that his feelings are the one thing that matters; and

_ nothing may have ever happened to challenge or break down this

...-@élusion. Worst of all, a child may have been brought up in the
Catholic Faith, but with the yet more disastrous delusion, instilled
by cowardly and doting parents, that God exists for him, not he
for God—that the whole fabric and structure of religion is
intended only to give him pleasure, just as the world with its
flowers and birds and animals is a plaything for him. He may
even have been impressed by the idea that it is a sweet and
consoling and very fitting thing, that Christ should have suffered
for him, but unthinkable that he should suffer for Christ! Can such
a ohild be held responsible, if he grows up seeking nothing else
in religion but his own gratification, and when, as it will some-
times do, religion changes from a nice feeling to a nasty feeling,
he either abandons it or becomes neurotic about it?

There are many causes of ego-neurosis as a disease, and many
people who would be astounded and incredulous if they were
told that their “sensitive” conscience, their horror of imperfec-
tion, their tormenting anxiety in approaching the sacraments, all
spring from self-love that is blinding them to the love of God.
Neither could these people be safely told to make a direct attack
on their self-love and uproot it—for no one, not even the sufferer,
knows how much fear, how much buried pain and grief, and even
how much twisted courage, is wrapped round that kernel of self,
and what might be the result if all the mechanism of defense were
suddenly struck off.

It is precisely here that the Sacrament of Penance in its
secondary aspect as a means of curing ego-neurosis could be
effective. But the reason why so much ego-neurosis is not cured ©

60

GUILT

by frequent confession, as it could be, is that few ego-neurotics
understand how to approach the sacrament, how to use it to cure
themselves. Instead of allowing it gradually to heal their psycho-
logical infirmities as well as absolve their actual sins, they go to
the opposite extreme and make of this sacrament of mercy and
life and joy an instrument of self-torture.

The whole process of going to confession, which is a quick and
simple process if it is rightly used, is ordered and controlled by
the wise and gentle discipline of the Church. It is safeguarded by
the restraint of the sweet yoke of Christ, laid upon the emotions
that swamp and obsess self-centered people. Every ego-neurotic
who does go to confession could make certain of a cure for his
own misery, if he would learn to understand and accept this
inward discipline.

The conditions asked of the sinner to obtain forgiveness and
reunion with God are contrition, which is sorrow for sins for the
love of God, and which includes, as of its very nature it must do,
the intention not to sin again; confession, which is accusing one-
self of some definite sin or sins to a priest to whom God has given
the power to forgive in his name; and satisfaction, which means
saying some prayers which the priest prescribes as a penance.*®

After the confession it is wise but not necessary to say the
penance at once (unless directed otherwise), and there should
be a thanksgiving. So far as psychological peace is concerned,
apart from other more important things, the thanksgiving has
incalculable value, but it is usually scamped, forgotten or omitted,
except by those rare sinners who are both really devout and
perfectly sane. The normal, un-neurotic person, who is not
religious by temperament though he is by conviction, is usually
so relieved when he has delivered himself of his sins that he is
apt to forget to say thank-you, and the ego-neurotic has usually
fallen into new quagmires of anxiety before he gets round to the
thanksgiving.

All this sounds simple, but it is not simple at all to the person—

* Added to this, if some injury to another person is confessed, the
penitent must undertake to put it right, if it is within his power to do so.

eerets

CONFESSION . 61

a woman, let us suppose—who is concentrated more on self than
on God.

She will doubt the sincerity of her contrition because she does
not think that she feels sorry, or sorry enough, or sorry for the
right reason. She will doubt the sincerity of her purpose of amend-
ment because she thinks it likely that in spite of her good

- intentions she may sin again. The examination of conscience, her

greatest bugbear of all, will present insurmountable difficulties.
She will either think that she has not done anything sinful, or
' that everything she has done is sinful, or that she has forgotten
_—~what she has done that is sinful. If she ever reaches a decision
about what she has or has not done, she will proceed to the
torment of trying to assess the gravity of the sin, to decide whether
it is mortal, venial, deliberate, sin at all, or imperfection. When
she has at last made her confession she will fall into fresh anxiety
about how she made it, whether she forgot, left out or misrepre-
sented something, even whether the priest understood what she
said. Next, she will bring to the saying of the act of contrition,
and her penance, the same anxiety which she does at home to
whether she has switched off the electric light or not. She will
worry about whether she really remembers what penance she
was told to say. ;

All these difficulties come from concentrating on self instead of
on God, and on not really believing in the goodness of God. A
little reflection could dispel them all.

Going to confession is an act of love for God. Like all love it is
an act of will. Feeling may or may not enter into it. |

In the love between two human beings there is not always,
all the time, emotional feeling; there is something that is much
more—union. The two are united by their will. They are so made
one by love that they seem to live in each other's life, they know
each other in themselves. Nothing can separate those who are
made one by love like this.

This applies even more to the love between God and man. On
God’s side there is, of course, perfection of love. His love holds
man in existence, man only is because God wills him to be. Man’s

62 CUILT

response to God’s love is his will that nothing shall mar this
union, that no shadow shall come between him and God. Sin does
cast a shadow between him and God. Grave sin separates him
from God, just as death separates a man from his own life, for
God is life and sin is the soul’s death.

When man is conscious of sin, he cannot, as we have seen, be
happy in God's presence. If he loves himself more than he loves
God, he will try to get further away, to break the union which
has become painful to him. But if his love of God is stronger than
his love for himself, he will be willing to suffer anything in order ~
to return to the joy of his conscious union with God.

Contrition is proved to be genuine, to be sorrow for sin for the
love of God, by the fact that the repentant sinner returns to God,
_ comes into his presence of his own free will, and deliberately
seeks that which Adam fled from, self-knowledge in the pene-
trating light of God, and the consciousness of being seen, literally
seen through, by God.

The reason why the contrition, apparent but not always real,
of those who testify and make public confessions at_ revivalist
_ meetings is frequently demoralizing is that it depends entirely on
being able to stimulate feeling. The feeling when it has been
achieved is not a feeling, much less a knowing, of the unutterable
goodness of God, but a certain excitement and morbid pleasure in
exposing one’s own sores (such as school children experience)
and in discussing one’s operation (which many women enjoy),
coupled with the relief of a violent and sudden discharge of pent-
up emotion felt by some women on being able to scream out loud
after the temporary paralysis of the vocal chords caused by seeing
a mouse at close quarters.

If it is impossible for someone to experience contrition for the
love of God—which, if they have not yet become aware of the
mystery and wonder of God within themselves, and do not know
God, it may be—attrition suffices for Confession. This is sorrow
for sin, or perhaps one could more truly call it deep regret for
sin, for the fear of Hell and the desire of Heaven. This is a motive
closer to self-love, but this time it is the kind of self-love that man
is told to have, when he is told to save his own soul. It implies a

CONFESSION fi 63

desire to come to love God and to return to him, and at least a
remote will to love him perfectly.

The examination of conscience presents a yet greater difficul
to the ego-centred. This is often because the woman we have
been discussing sets out to examine her conscience without having
the faintest idea of what it is she is going to examine. She is not
really trying to examine her conscience at all, but her feelings.

If she has no uneasy feeling about anything, she is worried
because she cannot discover anything to accuse herself of. If, on
the other hand, she has a tormenting feeling of guilt but her

ue" memory does not recall any definite sin that she thinks bad enough
to account for it, she probes and probes at the sore spot in order
to find something, which probably is not there.

Once again the old stumbling-block of feeling crops up! Nearly
everyone thinks that conscience is a feeling which tells us
infallibly when we have done or are doing right or wrong. We
have seen, in the peculiarities of the guilt feeling, that feeling is
never a reliable guide. People can easily be induced to feel that
it is wrong to be happy, right to destroy life. There are individuals
incapable of feeling that anything that they do is wrong, others
who feel that everything that they do is.

If feeling were conscience certain people would have no con-
science at all.

But every sane person has a conscience, though many, from
having ceased altogether to use their minds, have lost the use
of it, for conscience is the judgment of the intellect concerning
wrong and right. It is the use of reason. Even our reason would
fail to guide us were there not a revealed law, had God not cleared
up the confusion in our consciousness brought about by sin. We
have, however, the commandments of God and the voice of Christ
in the Church giving us the law of love in which there is life.

- We know with our minds that when we break that law we are
sinning.

The preliminary to any examination of conscience is to pray
for the light of the Holy Spirit. In our own darkness none of us
know ourselves; we can know ourselves only in God’s light.

I remember that as a young child, overwhelmed and sick with

64 GUILT

feelings of guilt, I used to pray, not that I should remember all
my sins, but that God in his mercy would allow me to forget some
of them!

The prayer for the light of God is the beginning of real self-
knowledge. It is not through trying to assess ourselves by our own
morbidity that we know ourselves, but by putting ourselves into
the blazing ray of that divine light. Examination of conscience
should not be turning our minds inward to our feelings, but
flinging them out to God—it should be, as it were, a going out
from ourselves to God, to look back at ourselves only from his
side, through his penetrating light; and, having looked back once,
and seen, as in his light we cannot fail to see, the sin disfiguring
our souls, we must turn back to God again and concentrate on
him. Thus our very sorrow for sin will become joy in the
contemplation of God.

The other worries and torments of anxious and ego-neurotic
people would disappear if, instead of concentrating on them, they
concentrated on God—because they all derive from not knowing
God, from having a total misconception of him.

The scrupulous ego-neurotic supposes God to be a monster of
cruelty—one who, seeing his child coming to him in sorrow, and
ready to make an effort that is very hard to her nature in order
to be taken back to his heart, waits eagerly for an opportunity to
trip her up and cast her into the outer darkness—and he watches,
not for anything which she could do deliberately, but for some
trifling lapse of memory or some failure in exactitude through
fatigue or nervousness!

There are many who complain of the informality surrounding
Confession, of the almost extreme measures used by the Church
to make it easy for the weakest. For example, that any words
expressing sorrow suffice for the act of contrition, that venial
sins need not be confessed at all, that forgotten sins are included
in the forgiveness anyway, that it practically never happens that
a confession made in good will need be, or should be, repeated.

How strange it is, many decide, to surround a sacrament with
so many little rules. But it is sufficient to spend one hour with an ©
anxious and over-scrupulous person, to realize that these are the

CONFESSION 65

rulings of divine mercy. They are the balm~poured into the
wounds, the calm and rest insisted upon by the divine physician.

If the sinner would look away from self to God, repentance
could only lift her up into joy, for she would find herself con-
templating, and in the end absorbed to the exclusion of self in
contemplating, the mystery of divine love and goodness.

The Father who longs more for the return of the lost child than
the child does himself, who makes the way back as easy as he can
and comes halfway to meet the child, who asks not for a micro-

__soepic, dreary history of his misdeeds, or for a trembling, broken
expression of sorrow—but only for an expression of the child’s
love and trust in his love.

Like the father of the Prodigal, God wants to make the Sacra-
ment of Penance a Feast. He wants to pour out his gifts on the
sinner, to clothe him in his Son’s radiant humanity, to put a ring
on his finger sealing him, his own, for ever more.

It is in this light too that the purpose of amendment should be
made, that is the determination to sin no more.

There is a growing tendency among wishful thinkers to doubt
man’s free-will. It is argued that, even if aman is not a monkey
or a “libido,” he has many unfathomable elements in his nature
which are outside the control of his will. He has an “unconscious”
as well as a conscious mind, he is subject to vast invisible influ-
ences, he is a slave to heredity and environment and so on.

‘ Catholics do not consciously doubt that they possess free-will,
nevertheless there are some of them who, without putting this
into words, do secretly doubt their own individual free-will. They
have made and broken too many resolutions—they have been to
Confession literally hundreds of times and they have not changed
at all; they really have very little hope that they ever will.

For ego-neurotics the case is even worse; they attack themselves
—verbally—more violently. They make sweeping resolutions, and
they feel that God ought to change them from weak, vulnerable
creatures to the very reverse in the twinkle of an eye.

We know too that people are able positively to violate them-
selves by onslaughts on their own will: attempts by sheer will
power to overcome fear or acute shyness, or the shrinking from

66 GUILT

life that is characteristic of many neurotics, frequently result in
a breakdown, while similar attempts to overcome sins of weak-
ness, such as drunkenness or solitary vice, not infrequently result
in increasing the frequency of the sin by making it a nervous
obsession. Psychologically this is easy to understand: repetition
of “I will” or “I will not”.is again a concentration on self, and this
time one that is a continual reminder of something that it is
desirable to forget; “I will not do this” is a suggestion to do it—
such acts of will become a strain, and tiring too; and for nervous
people fatigue is an added danger.

By way of a suggestion for those who do not suffer so much
as this from doubt of their free-will, and yet in the light of ex-
perience find something a little ironical in the sweeping promise,
found in some Acts of Contrition, never to sin again: it is advis-
able not to focus upon that but to stick simply to the purpose
of amendment, pray that one may not sin again, and concentrate
on some way of avoiding some one sin. It may be a negative way
—to give up a place where the temptation always lurks, or the
company that provokes it; or it may be a resolution of humility
that will help—for example, the irritable could decide to take
more sleep, the censorious to make fewer voluntary acts of self-
denial.

But for these people and all others the secret of using the will
as God wills us to is, first, to surrender our will wholly to his,
which means to accept the pattern of our nature as he made it, to
accept ourselves as being fallen men, and with that to accept the
certainty that we shall always be obliged to wrestle with our-
selves. To accept God’s word, that is his law—and above all, to
accept our destiny to be Christ-bearers.

In this we have the example of the Mother of Christ, and we
are in fact called upon to share her experience in a mysterious
way. To form Christ in ourselves, or more exactly to give ourselves
up to Christ that he may form himself in us. |

Our Lady’s Fiat—“Let it be unto me according to thy word”—
meant that she gave herself soul and body, to be made into Christ.
She gave him her eyes to be his eyes, her mind to be his mind,
her heart to be his heart; and before she gave birth to him, before

CONFESSION 67

his human body was fully formed from hers, she knew the
impulses of his love, who lived secretly within her. She was driven
out by his charity to her cousin Elizabeth, his presence in her
lifted her voice in an expression of joy in God that rings down
the ages; through his presence in her she became conscious of the
unborn generations that would know him, and she exulted in his
mercy to them. “My spirit has found joy in God who is my
saviour.”

She accepted too the suffering that he would inevitably bring
into her life, and that too began before he was born, in Joseph's

-ynisunderstanding, and in the added hardship of obeying the law
and journeying to Bethlehem when he, her life’s sweetness, was
also her heavy burden.

If we echo this Fiat, our whole attitude toward God changes
from being one of knowing about him, to one of knowing him.
We begin to realize, not from hearsay, but from our own ex-
perience what God's love and goodness and beauty really are. We
begin to understand what is really meant by that union in which
the heart of the Beloved beats in our own.

In this realization we get the real incentive to sesist sin, which
alone can separate us from God, the incentive that makes our free-
will always, at all times, the will to love God. Once this surrender

_is made and we become more and more continually aware of the
inexpressible beauty of God, the pain of resisting evil or of
returning to God’s presence if we have sinned will pale beside
the incomparably more terrible pain of being separated from
him. Our will grows strong in the measure in which we realize
the reality of God, and in the surrender echoing in our lives from
the Fiat of our Lady, all those mysterious and unexplored and
unconscious elements in human nature are drawn in, and carried
along on God's will.

It may be, however, that the change which takes place in us
as the result of surrendering our will to God in many Confessions

‘ will not be visible. Christ grew secretly, imperceptibly, in Mary,
and he grows secretly in us. The sign that he is growing in us is

. not that life becomes effortless, but that faith, which we live by,

_* " grows brighter, and hope and charity increase in us.

68 . GUILT

Repentance and the Sacrament of Penance are then the remedy
for guilt. In this remedy, short and simple and often almost formal
as going to Confession is, is contained the whole psychological
process by which fallen man can be restored to God and live in
the fullness of his nature.

In contrition he admits himself a sinner. In the examination of
conscience he knows himself in God’s light. In his purpose of
amendment he surrenders himself to God and discovers the power
of his own will—but in absolution more than all that is achieved.
In that stuffy, dark little box we call the confessional, every one
of the ceaseless drift of human beings of every kind and
description who kneel uncomfortably, listening to the whispered
words of absolution, is made one with God.

PART TWO

Guilt, Suffering, and Christ

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Chapter Vu. CHRIST AND GUILT

“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
wi Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

“f say more: the just man justices;

Kéeps grace: thdt keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—

Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
From GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Poems 82,

Tue KEY to human nature is Christ. He is the pattern in which
man was originally made, and by becoming one with him, man
can be restored to that pattern and become whole.

From all eternity he was with God and was God, having one
Nature with the Father, but a distinct person, all the same, the
Person of God the Son. He is known too as the Word: “At the
beginning of time the Word already was; and God had the Word
abiding with him, and the Word was God. He abode, at the
beginning of time, with God” (John i. i).

When the Son, the Word, became man, he uttered his Father's
love to the world, but from all eternity in the silence of the eternal

‘peace of God, every possible expression of his own Goodness

that God would create was known to him in the unspoken Word.
In his Son, the Father knew every man whom he would create.
In Christ each one of us was with God eternally, each one of us
was loved with the Father’s love for his only begotten Son.
“It was through him” that all things came into being, and
71

72 GUILT

“without him came nothing that has come to be.” All creation—
men, and even animals and material things—was to find ful-
fillment in him. But human beings above all. The human nature of
Christ was the absolute fullness and perfection of human nature,
human nature as God wanted it to be, for it was made for a person
who was God. Therefore it was the design, the idea, the origin
of every man whom God would create. Looking at Christ’s human
nature, we know what God wants ours to be.

Christ was to be the Light of the World, and it was God’s
decree that his light should be reflected in every man whom he
would create—all should radiate Christ and shine before God
with his light, as the light of the sun shines back to Heaven from
_the countless drops of dew that receive its brilliance. It was God’s

plan that every man would be alive and live fully with Christ’s’

life, that every man would be one with Christ and live in the life
of the Trinity, glorifying God in unimaginable joy.
God created the world to be the womb and the cradle of

Christ. It was a foreshadowing and: symbol of Christ’s human

birth, and of his birth in us. First there was darkness and the
waters of birth: “And the earth was without form and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters .. . and God said, Let there
be light and there was light” (Gen. 1.2-8).

When the earth was ready, the Spirit of God breathed over the
world again, and made man out of the dust, in his own image
and in the pattern of Christ. There before God, made from the
dust of the earth, was the man for whom the world was created,
who was destined for perfect joy: the man to whom Christ’s life
was given.

We have already spoken of Adam’s sin and its effect on man,
his loss of the Christ-life, the supernatural life, his separation
from God; now it is its effect upon Christ as man that we are
considering.

Christ is man’s destiny. There are shaciogisas who teach that he
would have been incarnate, even if man had not sinned, in order
that man should glorify God. But because man sinned, when

Christ did come into the world he came as the world’s redeemer, |

a ee ST To

CHRIST AND GUILT 73

taking the suffering of the world’s guilt on himself, making all the
pain of mind and body, which sin had brought into the world, .
his own.

He came to redeem, and he came to show men how to become
whole again, he came to show them how to cope with guilt, he
came to give them back his life, the life that was to illumine theirs
and to be the fulfillment of their humanity.

Man had made the world a place of darkness. Therefore in the
perfection of his humanity, the perfection of love, Christ plunged
his light into the darkness of the spirit of men. “And the light
shines in darkness, a darkness which was not able to master it”
(John 1. 5).

At the moment in time predestined from eternity, the Spirit
of God again descended upon the darkness and moved upon the
waters, and Christ was conceived in the womb of a Virgin. For
nine months the Son of God was hidden in the Virgin’s womb,
his human body forming from hers. He was voiceless, sightless,
powerless, his presence in the world secret. He was born in a
stable, among animals, in dirt and discomfort, and he experienced
the things that all infants do, cold and heat, hunger and thirst.

He became immediately the object of the jealousy, and therefore
the hatred, of Herod; he was hunted into exile and hiding. He
spent his babyhood as a refugee in a foreign country, his boyhood
in his foster-father’s workshop, learning a carpenter's trade. He
was obliged, like other boys, to labour to acquire his skill. We
may safely assume that some of his customers found fault with
what he made and haggled over the price of the work of the Son
of God.

He grew to manhood and his passage through adolescence was
unhindered, as every adolescence should be. At twelve years old,
the age at which a Jewish boy assumes the spiritual responsi-
bilities of manhood, when he remained, unknown to his parents,
in Jerusalem among the temple priests, he showed his independ-
ence and his determination to do the work God had sent him to
do; he showed too that though he was a son who loved his mother
deeply, indeed with love unequalled by any other son, he could
not be tied to her by the childish dependence or twisted emotions

14 GUILT

that cripple so many boys psychologically: “. . . his mother said to
him, My Son, why hast thou treated us so? Think, what anguish
of mind thy father and I have endured, searching for thee. But
he asked them, What reason had you to search for me? Could you
not tell that I must needs be in the place which belongs to my |
Father?” (Luke 2. 48-9).

Grown to manhood, he went out to meet and wrestle with evil,
to come face to face with Satan. He had taken our guilt on
himself, and acted as a guilty man should in the fight with evil,
although he was innocent. He began to fight evil by wrestling with
his own human nature, blameless though he was. He went into the
wilderness and fasted. He lived with the animals for forty days,
fasting. In the wilderness he was tempted by the Devil. For the
second time in the record of Christ’s life, angels and animals are
brought together by Christ’s presence. The first time was at his
birth; now .. . “the Spirit sent him out into the desert: and in the
desert he spent forty days and forty nights, tempted by the devil;
there he lodged with the beasts, and there the angels ministered
to him” (Mark 1. 12, 18). | |
_ There followed the short time of his public life, three years of
preaching, healing, tramping the roads,. working miracles,
training his disciples, and making both friends and enemies by the
uncompromising truth he taught. After that his Passion, beginning
with the Last Supper and the institution of the Blessed Sacrament,
the giving of himself to men in Communion, and passing swiftly
to the Agony in the garden, the betrayal by Judas, the crowning
with thorns, the unjust trials, the carrying of the cross, the naked-
ness and the death on the Cross.

And after three days in the tomb, he rose again, spent forty
days on earth, and then ascended into Heaven.

Those facts are, briefly, the story of Christ in his human nature
on earth.

There is a startling paradox in this, that he who came, as he
said, to give life to men, to fill up the measure of their joy, to
show them the way back to the wonder and peace of living in
God, he who is known by names that are radiant with joy, light,
life, love, is known also as “the Man of Sorrows.” At first sight

CHRIST AND GUILT ; 75

one would be tempted to say that he had fallen in love with our
suffering. He made himself subject to our limitations—to dis-
comfort, poverty, hunger, thirst and pain. He chose to experience
fear, temptation, failure. He suffered loneliness, betrayal, injustice,
the spurning of his love, mockery, brutality, separation, utter
desolation of spirit, the sense of despair, and death.

But it was not with our suffering that Christ fell in love; it-was
with us. He identified himself with our suffering because he
identified himself with us, and he came not only to lead his own
historical life on earth, but to live the life of every man who
would receive him into his soul, and to be the way back to joy
for every individual. He took our humanity in order to give us
his, and since guilty man must, as a very condition of his own
ultimate joy, and even for his fullest measure of earthly joy,
“make” his soul through expiation, through personal atonement,
Christ chose to atone for mankind as each man must do for him-
self: |through suffering. “He who was without sin was made sin
for us.”

Christ is “the Way.” He taught the way to wholeness, showed
it in his historical life, and he is the Way in the life of every
individual who does not refuse his destiny of Christhood.

There is no nerve or fibre of man that he does not know.
The secrets which the psychologists wrestle for with angels
and devils, the secrets they toil and labour to wrest from the
heart of man, the means to the healing of the suffering mind and
to human fulfillment, were told, two thousand years ago, by
Christ, to the motley crowd of poor, ignorant and suffering
- people who flocked to hear him speak.
- The modern psychologist thinks that it is he who has discovered
that the way back to mental peace is the way back through child-
~ hood, that man must become a little child again and re-live his
_earliest experiences with his father and mother to discover the
cause of his present suffering, and that some must even go through
something like a psychological rebirth in order to overcome the
fear of life, and incidentally the fear of death.
But it was Christ who first taught these things. He who said that |

76 GUILT

the way back to Heaven is the way back through childhood, that
man must become a child again to know God through a child’s
response to an infinitely loving Father. The one cure for anxiety,
for humiliation, for fear, is the trust of an unspoilt child in the
Fatherhood of God. To the uncontaminated child’s heart, the
secrets of divine Love are given.

“At this time, Jesus was filled with gladness by the Holy Spirit,
and said, O Father, who art Lord of heaven and earth, I give thee
praise that thou hast hidden all this from the wise and the pru-
dent, and revealed it to little children” (Luke 10, 21).

“I tell you truthfully, the man who does not accept the kingdom
of God like a little child, will never enter into it” (Luke 18. 17).

“You should not be asking, then, what you are to eat or drink,
and living in suspense of mind; it is for the heathen world to
busy itself over such things; your Father knows well that you need
them. No, make it your first care to find the kingdom of God, and
all these things shall be yours without the asking” (Luke
12.29-31).

“Why then, if you, evil as you are, know well enough how to.
‘ give your children what is good for them, is not your Father

much more ready to give, from heaven, his Holy Spirit to those
who ask him?” (Luke 11.18).

It was Christ who first puzzled men by telling them that they
must actually be born again: “Believe me when I tell thee this; a
man cannot see the kingdom of God without being born anew”
(John 3.3).

The human race as well as each individual had to be born
again, to be twice born, in order to be restored to its heavenly
Father. In Christ this happened; the birth of Christ was the
rebirth of Adam. To give life to man, God himself was born as an
infant, and in order that man should know the Kingdom of
Heaven in his heart, God became a little child!

Every man is born again when he is baptised. Once again the
Spirit of God breathes upon the waters of birth as it did at the
creation of the world and at the conception of Christ in the womb
of his mother. Now in the soul of the newly baptised, Christ is

CHRIST AND GUILT 77

conceived, that from their life he may be born into the world
again.

Everything discovered by science or by psychology can be
tested by the words of Christ. It is quite true that a man’s life
can be crippled by some flaw in his earliest relations with his
father and mother; this is because the father and mother stand
in the place of God to the little child, he forms his first emotional
—and usually unconscious—conception of God from them. Their
love for him must be God’s love for him. If it is not, if it is selfish
love, or if they disillusion him or betray him, his conception of ~
God will be awry. His journey back through all the confusion and
conflict of adult life and experience as well as through the broken,
cynical, unchilded childhood will be a long and difficult one; but
he must go back to the true childhood that finds the perfect Father
and is restored by him to a child’s trust. This is the absolute
condition for him to possess the Kingdom of Heaven.

We have seen that in general guilty man has, through trying
to escape from guilt, formed a false conception of God. Every-
thing Christ said or did on earth was designed to show men what
God is really like, and especially to show them his Fatherhood
and their Childhood.

The touchstone of the effect of guilt upon man is ; his awareness
or unawareness of God,—or again whether, even when he realizes
that God is present to him, this makes him more conscious of God
or of himself.

After he had sinned, the presence of God did not make Adam
more aware of God’s love and goodness, but of himself and his
own humiliation. Men have not changed since Adam. The more
a man looks into himself and probes the sores of his own sin, the
more self-conscious he becomes; the more he feels the pain of his
own wounded vanity and remorse. And the more aware he
becomes of himself, the less aware he becomes of God; the more
he loves himself, the less he loves God.

The beginning of human happiness, and even of human sanity,
is to begin to know God.

The mainspring of Christ’s life was his love for God, his

78 GUILT

heavenly Father. His first recorded words were about him—
“Could you not tell that I must needs be in the place which
belongs to my Father?” (Luke 2). So too were his last words,
spoken literally with his last breath—“Father, into thy hands I
commend my spirit; and (he) yielded up his spirit as he said it”
(Luke 23.46).

It is a commonplace now with sayehioloaae that it is a psycho-—
logical necessity for a child to know his father as great and good,
and if his father is not what he longs for him to be, he will go in
search of a “father-substitute.” If he has no father he will invent
one in his own mind and invest him with every adorable quality,
as well as a profound tenderness for himself. Some go so far

as to see this deep-rooted need of the great and good father as a »

proof that God is not real—they say that man has invented God to

satisfy his own necessity. It would be equally convincing to tell

a hungry man that bread is only an idea which he has invented
‘to satisfy his hunger.

Christ, who knew everything that is necessary to man, and that
only what is real is necessary to him, knew that the most pro-
found secret of psychological healing for guilty men is to know
the Eternal Father: “Eternal life is knowing thee, who art the
only true God; and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John
17.3). The gospel is woven together from beginning to end by
Christ’s continual awareness of the Father and his continual
awareness of his own Sonship.

He used everything around him to try to make men realize the . -

Father’s love for them. Everything should remind them of his
tenderness, even the sparrows and the daisies and the grass. In

that wonderful discourse before his death, in the hush of the.

Cenacle, he makes it clear that being at one with God is the ut-
most happiness man can know, and that it is his own happiness
and glory.

Just as he spoke continually of his Father to make him known |

and loved, he continually reiterated the fact that his human will
was wholly surrendered to him. His work in life was to do his
Father’s will: “I came not to do my own Will but the Will of him
who sent me.” Every act of his was done through him by his

mm a ER RT ale, TES el

PETER KURTEN

“a.

CHRIST AND GUILT 79

Father’s Will: “. . . and the Father, who dwells continually in me,
achieves in me his own acts of power” (John 14.10). -

Every word that he spoke was a word that it was his Father’s
will to utter through him: “. .. it was my Father who sent me that
commanded me what words I was to say, what message I was to
utter. And I know well that what he commands is eternal life;
everything then, which I utter, I utter as my Father has bidden
me” (John 12.49, 50).

It was this surrender to the divine Will that allowed the Holy
Spirit to sweep him on to his Passion and the consummation of
his love.

It is in the garden of Gethsemane that the surrender of Christ’s
own human will comes to its climax; here too, that the drama of
the culmination of his fight with the shadow, a fight that had been
going on all through his life, comes to the final crisis; and here that
in Christ the struggle every man is faced with is fought out,
ending in his accepting the suffering of the guilt of mankind.

_ In Gethsemane Christ faced the crisis which so many millions
must face when they are challenged by love—will they be
stripped of all pretence, and be naked, themselves, before love?
Will they consent to the revelation of the secret of self, and the
mystical death of Love? Will they take up the cross of daily hard-
ship and poverty and sacrifice of self, and carry the burdens of
life, for love of others? This is the challenge which comes in turn
to everyone—“Can you drink the chalice that I must drink?” It
came to Christ in Gethsemane, and his consent led on to the con-
summation of his love on the Cross.

Above all, it is in Gethsemane that we see the climax of Christ’s
acceptance of guilt, which began with the first pulsation of his
human heart, and dimly, from ages and ages away, realize
what mental suffering it involved him in. “My soul, he said, is
ready to die with sorrow” (Matt. 26.38). For he was seeing what
he was to take upon himself—the guilt of the whole world. He
saw all the sin of the world for all time in all its naked evil, and
he saw all the results of sin on the soul and body of man, and all
the results of it in suffering.

He saw all the disease and corruption, and festering and

80 GUILT

swarming and. seething of sin. For the second time in his human
life he saw “all the cities of the world and the glory of them’—the
blasphemy of luxury side by side with slums, the rat-infested
brothels hidden away in mean streets in London, flaunted almost
on the steps of the Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament in Montmartre.
He saw the black industrial cities with their back-to-back houses,
and the stunted and twisted little childen forced into the fac-
tories; he saw all the battlefields of the world with all their
mutilation and suffocation and agonized dying, he saw all the
secret dungeons and prisons where men rot away, and all the
concentration camps with their starvation and corruption and
their piles of corpses and their gas chambers. He saw all the
persecutions that would destroy the souls and bodies of men: the
persecution of Christians by heathens, of Catholics by Protes-
tants, of Protestants by Catholics, and, most bitter of all to the
breaking heart of Christ, the persecutions of Jews by Christians,
carried out in his own name.

All this and more and more and more. And incomparably more
terrible than any of it, the sheer elemental evil that was the cause
of it all.

But worst of all he felt himself to be bearing the guilt of it
all, felt, as he lay there on the ground exposed to the eye of God,
that all that guilt was on him.

Adam was the first sinful man, and he tried to repudiate guilt;
Christ was the first sinless man, and he accepted the guilt of all
sin. Adam was the first man to hide from God; Christ was the first
man to expose his soul, covered in the wounds and ugliness in-
flicted by guilt, to the fierce blaze of God’s light.

His human will shrank from this, and from the death that
measured evil hung up naked in the sight of God, covered from
the crown of his head to the soles of his feet with the blood and
the filth and the spitting of sin.

“When he had gone a little further, he fell upon his face in
prayer, and said, My Father, if it is possible, let this chalice pass
me by; only as thy will is, not as mine is” (Matt. 26.89).

As he prayed, in agony of mind, Christ experienced in himself
the struggle of our whole race—with the accumulation of guilt

CHRIST AND GUILT 81

from which nearly every individual, except the saint, tries to
escape, and for which nearly everyone repudiates all personal
responsibility. There was no escape for Christ. For the last time
his human will surrendered to the will of God, and the man who
had a few moments before been lying on his face on the ground,
oppressed by all the fear and dread and depression of all man-
kind, was comforted by an angel, and rose up, self-possessed,
majestic, to go out to the consummation of love.

Very aptly, that night, Christ was crowned with thorns.

Soon he was stripped of his garments. Adam had covered him-
self and hidden. Christ was exposed to the crowd, and lifted up
naked before those who ridiculed him and those he loved. And
there, on the cross, in that tremendous surrender of self, Love
was consummated.

It is a tenet of modern psychology that for his own happiness
man must accept himself whole, not as he would like to be but
as he is. He must reconcile the conflicting elements, the opposites
in himself. He must accept joy and sorrow, conflict and peace,
darkness and light. He must realize that the shadow, the dark side
of his nature, cannot be projected outside himself, or be buried
and ignored inside himself, but must be acknowledged and ac-
cepted, though this acceptance involves lifelong conflict. He must
realize too that the good in him and his loveliest spiritual aspira-
tions must be fulfilled; he needs to adore, to pray, to open. his
mind and heart to the world of the Spirit, to hear the “still small
voice of God” in the depths of his own being. He is soul and body;
he must accept this fact too, and know himself as man, a soul
and body which are inseparable in this life and affect each other
by every single thing done by either.

In Christ every opposite is reconciled. This-principle of paradox
and reconciliation runs all through his teaching, in all that he
does, in what he is. The only thing that Christ taught must be cast
out of the whole man is sin: “If thy right eye is the occasion of
thy falling into sin, pluck it out and cast it away from thee; better
to lose one of thy limbs than to have thy whole body cast into
hell” (Matt. 5.29). For the rest, the tares and the wheat must
grow together until the final harvesting. The sorrow for sin, the

82 GUILT

travail and sadness it has brought to the soul, the never-ceasing
wrestle with temptation, all these must be reconciled with the
soul’s peace, even with its joy, while this world lasts.

Christ is God and man.

He is Lord and servant.

The Man of Sorrows is the source of joy.
The Life of the World dies to give life.
The Light of the World shines in darkness.

The secret of this reconciliation of opposites in Christ is love.
In him is God’s love for man and man’s love for God: “God so
loved the world, that he gave up his only-begotten Son, so that
those who believe in him may not perish, but have eternal life”
(John 3.16).

Love made it joy to Christ to suffer man’s sorrows.

Love made it peace to Christ to wage man’s war.

Love made it fulfillment for Christ’s humanity to die to give
man life.

Love made it glory to Christ to illuminate man’s soul.

Christ’s whole teaching is love.

Men are beginning to discover now that they have largely lost
the power to love, and in this is their failure as human beings. In
Christ is the whole secret of love. Only by living Christ's life can
men find the way to love, and so to the fulfilling of their human
nature again.

Man’s life in Christ is the life of the risen Christ, but it must
be lived by men still taking up their cross daily. Christ has
told us what kind of life it is to be, in his last discourse on the
night before he died. He has shown us how it is to be lived, in his
own risen life on earth during the forty days between his resur-
rection and his ascension. It is to be a life of love; but that love
which will lead to the consummation of man’s human nature, as
it led to the consummation of his human nature, is to be like his
love.

“Your love for one another is to be like the love I have borne
you” (John 13.34). |

CHRIST AND GUILT 83

“This is my commandment, that you should love one another,
as I have loved you. This is the greatest love a man can show,
that he should Jay down his life for his friends” (John 15.12, 13).

To man as he is now, this seems at first sight to be an impossible
ideal.

A great deal of nonsense is written and spoken about love. It is
said to glorify mdn in itself, to ennoble him, to justify anything
whatever that he does. It is made the excuse for endless self-
gratification, sensuality, possessiveness, and cruelty. In the name
of love crimes and murders are committed, as well as many
beautiful and heroic acts.

Christ’s love is creative, it is the love which transmits life. It is
love which puts no limit at all on self-giving, which excludes no
one, includes everyone; it reaches to the ends of the earth, it is
communion with everyone. It is the love which even in a world
of suffering can fill up the life of each one with its full measure of

joy. - ,

Our Christ-life is the life of the risen Christ. He who lives in
us (to use St. Paul’s phrase, which repeats Our Lord’s words at
the Last Supper) has suffered all that any human being can suf-
fer now, and has overcome it all. He has overcome temptation
and manifold sorrows, hardship, complete poverty, anguish of
mind and body, and even death.

If it were possible for anyone to write the story of Christ’s mind,
he would write the story of every man, and he would discover
the incommunicable secrets of every man’s soul. And from coming
to know the inward lives of men, we learn more and more of
Christ. For every experience which men suffer or rejoice in, except
that of sinning, is an experience already lived through in Christ’s
earthly life, and one which he is living again in all those in
whom he lives.

This is the secret of man’s capacity to fulfill his human nature
through love, to atone for guilt by his suffering, to experience joy
in a world that is overburdened by sorrow. He has been given
back the life of Christ—Christ’s mind to adore with, Christ’s love
to love with, Christ’s sacrifice to atone with.

Christ lives on as an infant in infants, as a boy in adolescents,

84 GUILT

a man in men, a worker in workers, a poet in poets, a friend in
friends. He has experienced the particular sufferings of every age
including our own, and he is experiencing them now in his
members.

Many people who are physically and mentally helpless, de-
pendent, hidden away in prisons, unheard, inarticulate, voiceless,
live the advent life of Christ. They seem to be helpless to help the
world, but in their lives is the secret pulsation of Christ’s human
life, which healed the world.

Among those who wrestle with the fear of life, and the shrink-
ing from the adult world that offers its wealth and success on
Satan’s terms, some go with Christ into the wilderness to see the
cities of the world and their glory and to choose the humility and
uncompromising way of Christ in the world.

The neurotics and psychotics who suffer continually from fear
and from a tormenting sense of guilt, as well as those who accept
their own perfectly real shame and the grief for their own sins,
go with Christ into Gethsemane, and those who surrender them-
selves in these bitter trials to God’s Will, as Christ did, are
crowned with him with his crown of thorns. In many men Christ is
crucified: some crucify him on themselves by their sins; and some,
those hundreds and thousands who give their lives in battle for
the love of their fellow men, die his life-giving death with him,
with him they rise again. Sinners whose sins are seen by everyone,
those who are found out and put to shame, are stripped naked
with him—those who shrink from being known but accept his will
are exposed in his nakedness, and in his nakedness the lover's
surrender of the secret of self is consummated.

When Christ had risen from the dead, he no longer had the
limitations of human nature which he had accepted in taking
a real human nature to himself. There was nothing now to stop
him from dazzling the world with his glory. At the first glance,
one would expect him to do so. His apostles were still dazed and
shaken by the shock and horror of Calvary, they were in fear of
their own lives, and still brokenhearted by the seeming loss of
Christ and of the promised kingdom.

He could have made his voice heard and his beauty visible

CHRIST AND GUILT 85

simultaneously all over the world, bringing his enemies to their
knees, restoring those who, in spite of their weakness, loved him
to immediate joy and certainty. He could have made himself
loved by the whole world, and have swept away the threats that
overshadowed his little flock, as they would overshadow it
through time.

He did none of this. Indeed he seemed to be as intent on
proving himself to be really man after his Resurrection as he had
been in proving himself to be God before it. The news that he had
risen from the tomb was entrusted to people who still had their
tears for his death upon their faces. They were to tell it, it was
to be given by one to the other, and the first messenger, known
to be an emotional woman who would hardly be credited, was
sent to convince the first Pope that Christ had risen.

Without being under any necessity to do so in his glorified
body, Christ did ordinary things. He walked and talked and ate
with men, built a little fire and cooked for them, comforted them
and renewed their faith, but not by compelling them to be
shocked into faith—even by a shock of joy—but by approaching
each one individually through the individual’s own mentality and
temperament. He used the same means as before—words, kind-
ness, going on a journey, setting his pace to the pace of the others,
accepting their invitations, preparing food for them with his own
hands, and that most wonderful and yet simplest way of all, the
breaking of bread, the giving of himself sacramentally.

He was showing men how they were to go on living his risen
life all through time.

They were to give him to one another, and as simply as he
gave himself, through words and kindness: through their work
and friendship, through learning one another’s mind and heart
and approaching each one separately, through accepting what
each one had to give, and giving too: by comforting one another
and leavening the sorrow of the world by the interchange of their
Christ-love. Above all, by sacramental communion with him, in
which they are made one.

Christ knew man’s need to learn how to love as he loves, and
so to fulfill his human nature; he knew man’s need to atone for

86 GUILT

sin, and so be able to rejoice in the source of joy, the uncreated
light of God.

He had already told his apostles at the Last Supper what the
world in which men would lead his risen life would be like. A
world such as we know now—a world of unbelief, of persecutions,
of hatred and contempt for the purity and truth of Christ and for
those who live his life; yet, for those in whom Christ lives,
a world in which they will be restored to the wonder and joy of
the Kingdom of Heaven in their own hearts. And all their living
with one another would be an interchange of his life.

“If the world hates you, be sure that it hated me before it
learned to hate you. .. . They will persecute you just as they have
persecuted me; they will pay the same attention to your words as
to mine” (John 15.18, 20).

“I have said this to you, so that in me you may find peace. In
the world, you will only find tribulation; but take courage, I have
overcome the world” (John 16.33).

“You have only to live on in me, and I will live on in you...
if a man lives on in me, and I in him, then he will yield abundant
fruit; separated from me, you have no power to do anything”
(John 15.3, 5).

“I have bestowed my love upon you, just as my Father has
bestowed his love upon me; live on, then, in my love” (John 15.9).

“All this I have told you, so that my joy may be yours, and the
measure of your joy may be filled up” (John 15.11).

And so, the heavenly paradox is to go on in man. But there are
yet more mysteries of divine goodness to be accepted, concerning
how it can be, for every man could well echo the words of the
mother of Christ, when her destiny and that of the whole world
was told to her by an angel—“How can that be?” and the answer
to every poor broken sinful creature is the same as it was to the
sinless mother of God: “The Holy Spirit will come upon thee.”

Christ lives in man through the descent of the Holy Spirit into
his soul, the Spirit of wisdom and love and light, who gives men
understanding and patience, fortitude and peace, who brings the
seed of Christ to them, and to its full flowering in them. And this
thought of the coming of the Spirit sweeps us back on the great

CHRIST AND GUILT — 87

wings of the Dove of Peace to the unimaginable wonder of the
love of the Blessed Trinity in eternity, and God’s decree of perfect
joy for man. For the Holy Spirit is the love between Father and
Son, the burning light in which from all eternity each man has
been with God in his only Son.

An unborn child forming in his mother’s womb is conditioned
by her love for him. Before he draws his first breath her love for
him is forming his character, is disposing him to be aware of love
as his true environment and the glad source of his life, to be drawn
towards it almost irresistibly, to respond to it as the condition of
his being, to accept it as he accepts the air that he breathes.

We human creatures, each one known to God from all eternity,
are formed by God’s pre-creational love, as children are formed |
by the pre-natal love of their mother.

Because this is so, and because Christ has given back his life
to us, we are drawn towards our true happiness in spite of all the
evil that is in us. Goodness draws the human soul as a tide is
drawn. by light.

Chapter Vir. THE REAL REPRESSION

“We have all of us to continue the Incarnation.”—anBt GODIN

THE GREAT REPRESSION of our age is the repression of Christ in .

man.

If Christ in man were simply an idea, or something contrary to
- human nature which man could acquire and somehow add to
himself by his own efforts, this could not be true; but it is so
_ much a part of us that we cannot cast it out or get rid of it, but
can only repress or inhibit it.

If we inhibit something, we succeed in burying it so deep,
pushing it so far out of sight, that we are completely unconscious
of it, and it is not able to function in us at all. If we repress it, we
are consciously holding it back and trying to frustrate it, even if
we do not recognize it for what it is. Those who are repressed are
always conscious of a strain, they live in a state of nervous tension

and frustration without being aware of the fact that they’ are

causing the trouble themselves.

Very often people are said to be repressing their sexual in-
stincts; sometimes they are said to be repressing their aggressive
instincts; but most often they are said to be repressing themselves,

we speak of a person being repressed, meaning presumably his
whole personality.

The fact of the matter is that if anyone represses himself, he
does so, and can do so, only because he is repressing Christ in
himself.

It is only the full flowering of Christ in a man that can give him
a willingness to suffer strong enough to lead him out, as Christ
was led out by the Spirit, to face the shadow: to be tempted and

&8

THE REAL REPRESSION ‘ 89

to wrestle with temptation, to be afraid and to overcome fear, to
see the world and all the “glory” of it challenging him, and to
overcome the world. It is only his surrender to his destiny of
Christhood that can enable any individual to dare those experi-
ences in life which lead to the fulfilling of his human nature, and
only this that uninhibits his capacity for love, so that through the
power of love his life may bear fruit and be a communion with all
other men.

Man was created by God after the pattern of his Son and in
the sense explained later.*° The image of Christ is woven into
every man’s being. Man cannot know this, save by God’s reveal-
' ing it to him: man has no innate knowledge that God exists, still
less that he has a son and that this son became man. But the
fact that man is made in the pattern of the Son and that Christ’s
image is woven into his very being has certain consequences: in
the merely natural effort to be more fully himself, to be all that
he should be, he collides, so to speak, with Christ, not knowing
what he is in contact with, but stirred, all the same, by shadow-
ings of that unrealised Presence. Feeling his own imperfections,
he is in fact feeling the defects in his resemblance to Christ: try-
ing to imagine himself restored, it is Christ that his imagination
is feeling for, though he does not know it.

Every man is born with Christ in this sense present in the
unconscious depths of his being, and sometimes entering his con-
sciousness as a dream enters the consciousness of a sleeper, flood-
ing his mind with its secret and possessing him. And just as it
does in a dream, it comes often in the form of a symbol.

It comes to him too in myths and fairy-stories and those recur-
ring, irresistible fantasies that motivate his inner life.

Intuitively man reaches out to God in the created world and
listens for his voice in the wind. He trembles at the sound of his
anger in the storm and the blaze of his glory in the lightning, he
hears the tender voice of his love in the gentle wind that stirs the
grass. This secret presence in man’s soul hovers on the fringe
of his consciousness, possessing him and yet evading him, like a
memory which is just out of his reach and yet saturates his

* See p. 147.

$0 GUILT

thought with its warmth and colour, as the sunlight saturates the
thin green leaves on the trees.

Because it is knowledge of Christ that is innate in man, it
reaches out, seeking for the Father. Man is close to truth in the
error that leads him to discover many gods in nature, some fiercely
potent and masculine, seeding the earth with life, some feminine
and tender, maternal goddesses in whom life grows and becomes
fruitful, some virginal as the first light of dawn on the shallow
waves on the shore—like Aphrodite, the beloved, and Goddess of
Love, born of the living waters. For in the one God all these
abide. In him is all potency, all life, all paternity, all motherhood,
all virginity, all love and all life, and the created world is the
expression of the love of the one God.

Men have always turned to God, though in the form of many
gods, to bless the sowing of seed, to make the earth fertile with
the bread of life—even before Christ came to sow the seed of his
blood and to be the Bread of Eternal Life.

Before he came who is the Light of the World, they worshipped
light in the sun. Sometimes one arose among them, pure enough
to receive truer intuitions than the others. Thus Akhnaton,
Pharaoh of Egypt in the fourteenth century before Christ, lifted
the worship of the sun to the worship of the one god who lit the
sun, and knew the tenderness of God for his creatures, as if he had
heard it from the mouth of Christ—“Thou art he... ,” he sang,
“who createst the man child in woman—”

Who makest seed in man

Who giveth life to the Son in the body of his Mother,
Who soothest him that he may not weep,

A nurse (even) in the womb,

Who givest breath to animate everyone that he maketh.
When he cometh forth from the body... .

On the day of his birth,

Thou openest his mouth in speech—

Thou suppliest his necessities.®

He tells the secret of his prophetic intuition in one line of his
great hymn—“Thou art in my heart.”

® Arthur Weigall, The Life and Times of Akhnaton (London: Thornton
Butterworth).

THE REAL REPRESSION 91

Water is the Christ-symbol of life, and all through the ages the
mystery of water shines in man’s soul. Before John baptized in the
Jordan, water in the mind of man was the symbol of the»birth
of the spirit. The journey of the dead into everlasting life was
across the dark birth waters of the river Styx. Before Christ him-
self rose from baptismal waters, primitive peoples initiated their
young men into adult life with ceremonies of immersion, and so
they were born into manhood. Those who are familiar with the
dying know how often death comes to them in the symbol of
water bearing them gently on its flood into life. In our over-
civilized, overspecialized modern world, it is water that wells up
in the soul of the dreamer or stretches out before the awakening
eyes of those who seek psychological healing, at the moment
preceding their psychological rebirth.

The secret knowledge of Christ which comes to man out of the
turgid darkness of his own unconsciousness cannot come through
in its purity. It is stained by man’s touch, mixed with his sensu-
ality, twisted by his ignorance, contracted by his littleness, and
like the symbols in his dreams, confused with the superficial
things of his conscious life. © é

Since the human race is a fallen race, man’s innate knowledge
of God is confused. He fumbles in the darkness like a blind man
trying to learn the divine features through the touch of his finger
tips; but the mystery of Christ, of the Trinity, and of man’s place
in that unutterable dispensation of love, can only be known by
Faith, through the revelation of the Word.

That revelation is realized in the Mystical Body of Christ, and
in each member of it. “I pray for those who are to find faith in
me through their (the apostles’) word; that they may all be one;
that they too may be one in us, as thou, Father, art in me, and I
in thee; so that the world may come to believe that it is thou
who hast sent me. And I have given them the privilege which
thou gavest to me, that they should all be one, as we are one; that
while thou art in me, I may be in them, and so they may be per-
fectly made one. So let the world know that it is thou who hast
sent me, and that thou hast bestowed thy love upon them, as
thou hast bestowed it upon me” (John 17.20-24).

92 ; GUILT

Christ in us is our supernatural life, on which the fulfilling of
‘ our human nature depends. When we repress Christ we repress

self.

Those people who are quite convinced that what they are
repressing is their sexual life are really repressing Christ.

For this reason there are far more sexually repressed people
among those who suppose themselves to be living a full sexual life
than among those who are enduring enforced sexual starvation.
Sex is a glorious medium of life-giving love, but it can only be
lived fully if the love it expresses meets with no hindrance.

The love between man and woman, in its perfection, is a more
visible showing of the imprint of God in human nature than any
other. They know the ineffable joy that shines straight down onto
them from the eternal love of the Blessed Trinity; the natural end
of their love is to generate life in their own likeness. In their child
the man and woman see themselves and one another; they see
the proof of their oneness in love. Yet their child is not just a
projection of themselves, he is a separate person, because God
has breathed a soul into him, which no man could generate, and
this soul has been known to.God eternally. It is the child’s soul
that makes him an individual.

We think with amazement of the privilege given to those
craftsmen who are entrusted with the work of making the chalice
to hold the precious blood of Christ—or to those who make the
bread that is to be changed into the Body of Christ; but husband
and wife share the privilege, they make the children of flesh and
blood, to be changed into the Mystical Body of Christ on earth.

Sexual love does not only give natural life, through procreating
and bearing children. Christ has made a sacrament to empower
this love with his own. Through the gift of this sacrament, hus-
band and wife give a continual increase of Christ’s love and life
to one another.

Sex is only fulfilled when it becomes the expression of love that
gives life, supernatural or natural life or both. In this it is a living
of Christ’s life, for Christ came to give Life. Those who frustrate
and destroy natural life by destroying their own unborn children,

THE REAL REPRESSION 93

or supernatural life by destroying the life in their own and one
another’s souls—by using their sexual powers sinfully, in or out
of marriage—are those who are really repressing sex, which can
only be lived fully through the life of Christ in the man and
woman, unhindered, fulfilling the intent of love of the Blessed
Trinity. ’

Many people suppose that the members of religious orders are
either repressing or “sublimating” sex. They are doing neither.

Every religious knows the consummation of love between God
and his soul, which is, just as marriage is, comparable to the
marriage between Christ and his Church, and gives, as that gives,
supernatural life to the world. And in living his Christ-life
every true religious develops and fulfills the instincts of manhood
or womanhood to the fullest capacity. Every life lived in religion
is life-giving, every one bears Christ into the world, brings a con-
tinual birth of Christ and a continual resurrection of Christ into
the world, and in doing that brings the manhood or womanhood
of the religious to its own perfection.

The same thing applies to unmarried people who forgo the
physical expression of sex in the world—supposing, of course,
that their reason for doing so is not selfishness or fear of responsi-
bility, but some circumstance in which there is a clear indication
of God's will. If they allow what will almost certainly be a cause
of loneliness and suffering to them to corrode and embitter their
natures, and refuse to look for that aspect of Christ’s life which
it really indicates, they may indeed wither up their sex. Women
may become hard, bitter, and unmotherly, men effeminate, de-
pendent and incapable of taking responsibility; in that case they
will repress their sex, because they are repressing Christ. If they
surrender their will to the intent of Christ in their life, they wil
fulfill their human nature and their sex as completely as married
people, and sometimes more completely. They will not sublimate
sex, for sex is sublime in its proper expression, and cannot be
made more so.

It is the curious idea of those who, while being greatly agitated
about sex, have not given much thought to its purpose, that any-
thing which uses up superfluous energv or distracts the mind

94 GUILT

“sublimates sex”; thus football, arts and crafts, community sing-
ing, keeping rabbits, and countless other things of the same kind,
are said to be “sublimations of sex”!

Most people do repress Christ, not only in their sexual love,
but in all their human relationships. Man represses Christ in him-
self because he is ignorant of the fullness of joy in this mystery
of Christ-life, and still more because he is afraid of “the shadow.”
He is afraid to face the reality of his individual share in the guilt
of the world, but naturally even more afraid to accept the limit-
less sorrow and shame of the agelong guilt of all mankind. Sur-
render to his destiny of Christhood must include both these. There
is no way of discovering, except by surrender, that in accepting
the darkness we also accept the light: that in accepting the
universal experience, the collective experience of all men, through
our surrender to the one Man in all mankind, we accept simul-
taneously all the loves of all men, and all their power of love: that
in accepting the burden of the earth, we accept the joy of Heaven.

If we dare to surrender, our infinitesimal experience becomes
the experience of the whole world. We live in the past, the present,
and the future, we receive the sorrow of Eve and all the children
of Eve, and also the sorrow and the joy of the second Eve, the
Mother of Christ and of the Mystical Body of Christ.

Deep in the heart of everyone living is the longing to be in
communion with other men. It is this longing which gives even
_selfish people an instinctive wish that they were of the fibre that
“is willing to bear its share of the common burden of effort and
hardship. Of all the sufferings of the insane, none is so terrible
as isolation, and the cruellest conflict that torments the neurotic
is the conflict between his fear of humiliation, which makes him
withdraw from other people, and his longing to be one with them.

In Christ, all those who are members of his Mystical Body are
one in a way that our generation, divided and torn as it is, can
hardly imagine. It is a far closer oneness than that of husband
and wife, of a mother and her unborn child—of a man with his
own thought.

We are one as the different parts of a human body are one
because in them all there is one life. The bloodstream that flows

THE REAL REPRESSION 95

through the human body gives life to the brain and the heart, to
every limb and organ, to the tips of the fingers—not a multiplica-
tion of lives, but one.

The cause of this oneness is that all the members of Christ's
Mystical Body live with his life.

Here is a description of the union between Christ and those
who belong to his Mystical Body: “Thus our relation to Christ is
closer than the natural relation of brothers to a brother or even of
children to a parent. It is that of cells in a body to the person
whose body it is. It is therefore closer than any natural relation-
ship that one human being can have with another. By membership
of the Mystical Body we are more closely related to Christ Our
Lord than our Lady is, simply as his mother in the natural order.
. .. Each one of us is more closely related to every other member
of the Church by this life of grace than to his own mother by the
life of nature. “And you are Christ’s body, organs of it depending
upon each other’ (I Cor. 12.27). This is easy enough to say. But
if we were ever to let ourselves look squarely at it and really
try to live by it, its immediate effect would be a remaking of
ourselves so thorough that nature shrinks from it; and the ultimate
effect would be to renew the face of the earth.”*

Perhaps it is because of the tremendous implications—and
sometimes terrible implications—of this mystery that many pious
people prefer to shrink into themselves and their own devotions,
rather than to allow the whole wonder of their life in Christ to
break down every barrier to the uncompromising charity which it
commits them to.

It means that nothing whatever that one member of the Church
does is without its effect on all the others.

If one member—like the “Monster of Diisseldorf,” who was a
Catholic—commits the most hideous series of murders, the shame
is shared by all the others, they all owe penance, they all owe
reparation.

It is time that Christians put aside the self-protective type of
religion, with its interminable formalities and pious exercises and
its careful exclusions and respectable cliques, and recognized

° F, J. Sheed, Theology and Sanity, pp. 271-2.

94 GUILT

“sublimates sex”; thus football, arts and crafts, community sing-
ing, keeping rabbits, and countless other things of the same kind,
are said to be “sublimations of sex”!

Most people do repress Christ, not only in their sexual love,
but in all their human relationships. Man represses Christ in him-
self because he is ignorant of the fullness of joy in this mystery
of Christ-life, and still more because he is afraid of “the shadow.”
He is afraid to face the reality of his individual share in the guilt
of the world, but naturally even more afraid to accept the limit-
less sorrow and shame of the agelong guilt of all mankind. Sur-
render to his destiny of Christhood must include both these. There
is no way of discovering, except by surrender, that in accepting
the darkness we also accept the light: that in accepting the
universal experience, the collective experience of all men, through
our surrender to the one Man in all mankind, we accept simul-
taneously all the loves of all men, and all their power of love: that
in accepting the burden of the earth, we accept the joy of Heaven.

If we dare to surrender, our infinitesimal experience becomes
the experience of the whole world. We live in the past, the present,
and the future, we receive the sorrow of Eve and all the children
of Eve, and also the sorrow and the joy of the second Eve, the
Mother of Christ and of the Mystical Body of Christ.

Deep in the heart of everyone living is the longing to be in
communion with other men. It is this longing which gives even
_selfish people an instinctive wish that they were of the fibre that
“is willing to bear its share of the common burden of effort and
hardship. Of all the sufferings of the insane, none is so terrible
as isolation, and the cruellest conflict that torments the neurotic
is the conflict between his fear of humiliation, which makes him
withdraw from other people, and his longing to be one with them.
_ In Christ, all those who are members of his Mystical Body are
one in a way that our generation, divided and torn as it is, can
hardly imagine. It is a far closer oneness than that of husband
and wife, of a mother and her unborn child—of a man with his
own thought.

We are one as the different parts of a human body are one
because in them all there is one life. The bloodstream that flows

THE REAL REPRESSION 95

through the human body gives life to the brain and the heart, to
every limb and organ, to the tips of the fingers—not a multiplica-
tion of lives, but one.

The cause of this oneness is that all the members of Christ's
Mystical Body live with his life.

Here is a description of the union between Christ and those
who belong to his Mystical Body: “Thus our relation to Christ is
closer than the natural relation of brothers to a brother or even of
children to a parent. It is that of cells in a body to the person
whose body it is. It is therefore closer than any natural relation-
ship that one human being can have with another. By membership
of the Mystical Body we are more closely related to Christ Our
Lord than our Lady is, simply as his mother in the natural order.

. . Each one of us is more closely related to every other member
of the Church by this life of grace than to his own mother by the
life of nature. ‘And you are Christ’s body, organs of it depending
upon each other’ (I Cor. 12.27). This is easy enough to say. But
if we were ever to let ourselves look squarely at it and really
try to live by it, its immediate effect would be a remaking of
ourselves so thorough that nature shrinks from it; and the ultimate
effect would be to renew the face of the earth.”*

Perhaps it is because of the tremendous implications—and
sometimes terrible implications—of this mystery that many pious
people prefer to shrink into themselves and their own devotions,
rather than to allow the whole wonder of their life in Christ to
break down every barrier to the uncompromising charity which it
commits them to.

It means that nothing whatever that one member of the Church
does is without its effect on all the others.

If one member—like the “Monster of Diisseldorf,” who was a
Catholic—commits the most hideous series of murders, the shame
is shared by all the others, they all owe penance, they all owe
reparation.

It is time that Christians put aside the self-protective type of
religion, with its interminable formalities and pious exercises and
its careful exclusions and respectable cliques, and recognized

°F, J. Sheed, Theology and Sanity, pp. 271-2.

96 GUILT

Christ and themselves in the disreputable members of the Church;
the socially ostracized, the repulsive, the criminals, the insane;
the drifting population of the streets and the doss-houses, the drug
addicts and drunkards; the man waiting in the condemned cell
to die—and the tiresome, thankless and dissolute members of a
man’s own household. It is time that Christians answered Cain’s
question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” by more than an affirmative:
“I am more than that, I am my brother.”

To each man who lives in Christ, all men belong, all love and
wisdom and joy, all suffering and fear and atonement, all power
and beauty, all living and dying, all childhood and manhood.
Because Christ is whole in each member of his Body on earth
now, each in a sense is the Mystical Body. He is in a sense all
_ humanity. Each man owes his tears for his own sins to every other

man, and each owes the joy of Christ to every other. The Christian
in whom Christ lives has in himself all men, the child in him is
capable of understanding all the dreams and fears and mystery
of all childhood, the lover in him the love of all manhood.

The responsibility of all sin is upon the shoulders of each Chris-
tian man.

We cannot escape from Christ, the destiny of our being. We
can open our minds, abandon our will to the mystery—or refuse
to do so, and live in conflict with Christ, and therefore in conflict
with our own life, struggling, as the majority are doing today, to
repress Christ in our souls, to dam up our life, and to doom the
human race with the doom of a city divided against itself.

To accept, to abandon ourselves to our destiny as “other
Christs,” is not only to allow all the grief and suffering of the
world to flow through us, but also eternal love, love that has no
beginning in time and does not end in time: love that has no
limitation of place, or act, that does not depend upon the acci-
dents of our lives, though it can be expressed through them too.

The responsibility of all the love of all the ages of the world
belongs to each one, through each one flows the whole torrent of
life that is given from generation to generation by love: love,
which through the miracle of the Incarnation is made tangible
and audible in us, so that its music is heard in ovr voices—in

THE REAL REPRESSION 97

the plighting of our troths, in our marriage vows, in our words
of comfort and pity and joy, in our laughter, in the songs beside
our cradles, in our choirs of adoration; love, which we transmit
with our touch, with the work of our hands, with the labours
and pains, the ecstasies and the embraces of our bodies, in the act
of procreation, of giving birth, in nursing and serving, and in
closing the eyes and bathing the limbs of our dead; love, which
holds the timelessness of God in a moment of time, which—with
the sacramentals of our flesh and blood, our hands, our voices, our
hearts, our minds—forgives, redeems, heals, generates, adores.

To attempt to repress Christ in ourselves is to attempt to hold
back the river of life, to stop the bloodstream of the Son of God
that is the lifestream of all mankind.

The man in whom Christ is not repressed is a channel through
which the life and love of all humanity flows back to God. And as
the bloodstream in a man’s body is purified by the air he breathes,
his supernatural life is purified by the breath of the Spirit that
perpetually renews the life of Christ in man. It flows through the
divine Mind and through the heart of mankind, continually
purifying human nature of the poison that has infected it, per-
petually renewing the life of the world.

Chapter Ix. THE HUMAN DESTINY

“And yet I tell thee, if thou shouldst ask Me who these are, I should
reply (said the sweet and amorous Word of God) ‘They are another
Myself... .”—Dialogue of sr. CATHERINE OF SIENA

THE SAINT is the only person who makes no attempt whatever to
resist his destiny as a human being, the destiny to be a Christ.

This is the explanation of everything that causes us to wonder
in sanctity, of everything that puzzles us in it, and even of every-
thing in it that startles or horrifies us.

It explains the saint’s attitude to his own sins. The saint has
become one with Christ. His sense of sin is Christ’s sense of sin.
Christ took all sin upon himself, from the first sin of Adam to the
last sin of the last man to live in the world. “Him, who knew no
sin, God has made sin for us” (II Cor. 5.21).

Christ identifies himself with every sinner, and—yet more as-
tonishing—God identifies every sinner with Christ. The saint, who
is in fact a sinner and the natural heir to original sin, stands before
God covered in his own guilt, but he also stands before God as
Christ, covered by all guilt. He knows each sin as all sin, and him-
self responsible for it all. Christ in him is the explanation of the
saint’s attitude to suffering, both of his willingness to suffer and’
his desire to suffer.

Any man’s will to participate in the lives of other men can be
measured precisely by his willingness to suffer to gain this object.
Christ wills not only to take part in other men’s lives, but to be
one with all other men without exception; consequently there is
no limit at all to what he is willing to suffer. Suffering is the means
by which Christ chose to redeem sin; logically so, since it is the

98

THE HUMAN DESTINY 99

direct result of sin. For this reason Christ and suffering are in-
separable for so long as there remains one jot of unredeemed sin,
or one sinner on earth.

It is not for the love of suffering that Christ chooses it in his
saints, in whom he lives on, but for the love of men, because it is
their redeeming and his communion with them. “It is a joy and
a bliss,” we have heard Julian of Norwich say, “an endless liking
to me, that ever J suffered passion for thee; and if I might have
suffered more, I would have suffered more.”

In man Christ does suffer more, and he will suffer more until the
end of time; and in the saints, simply because they love men as
Christ loves them and with his love of them, it is “a joy, and a
bliss, an endless liking” to suffer too.

When we are scandalized by the voices of the saints we must
listen, beneath the crude and clumsy expression, for the under-
tone which is the voice of Christ.

‘Those who accept only a material explanation for man’s psyche
are right in one thing at least: suffering is a man-made thing, it is
in, fact the only man-made thing that there is. We do make our
own and one another's suffering, by actually co-operating with
Satan’s hatred of us, by consenting to his temptations to sin.
Suffering is not only something we have given to one another,
it is also something we have given to God, in the person of
Christ.

Christ came to give life to humanity. For answer, humanity
gave suffering to Christ, and Christ accepted it and gaye-suffer-
_ ing the power of his love. That is why no Christiai#-can be wzth-
out suffering, and every saint—that is, every man who does not
resist his destiny to be a Christ—is destined also to suffer, to
the limits of his human capacity not merely for suffering, but—
and this is so much more—for love; and more yet, not merely of
his own capacity for love but Christ’s. Ca 3°32 fat

This means that in surrendering himself w ithout reserve to lis
destiny of Christhood, the saint surrenders himsylf to sufser,wil
the suffering of the world, he takes all the siz-uf the world upun
himself as his individual responsibility. “He who grows in love
grows in grief”: these words of a saint (St. Catherine of Siena)

100 GUILT

are a tremendous understatement, for he who grows in Christ’s
love opens his heart not only to grief but to all the suffering and
terror and sorrow and pain of the whole world.

Christ has given suffering the power of his love; this power is
now inseparable from it, and this is why suffering is never in-
effective. It can do appalling harm and it can do unimaginable
good, but it cannot do nothing. It has become the one thing which
because of this infusion of love is never negative.

Christ has given suffering a sacramental quality, and like any
sacrament its effectiveness for good or ill depends upon the man
who receives it. Man can receive suffering sacrilegiously, he can
resent it and do all in his own puny power to resist it; he can
desecrate it, and desecrated suffering is destructive. It corrodes
the man who has inflicted it on himself and turns him sour; in
the end it destroys him. In the measure that we accept the suffer-
ing God allows to come to us individually, we accept the power
of God’s redeeming love, which we can use to heal mankind as
well as to be healed by it ourselves.

The stoic’s attitude to suffering is just as destructive to his
humanity as the coward’s. In him, pride puts up a tremendous
sham of indifference, which sometimes really becomes indifference
to others, but never really indifference to self. Self merely sets
in a mould of callousness as painless—or painful—as a tooth
stopped over an exposed nerve.

The saint’s desire for suffering is not the expression of a morbid
mind; but of the love of Christ for the world. The saint’s desire to

*. suffer if Christ’s desire to heal.

Satan, whose craft it is that has induced man to make his own
suffering, can use ii for his own ends. This is a mysterious and
terrible fact, and it is comforting to know that the ultimate con-
trol of it is in God’s hands, even when he allows Satan to make
use cf it: Ta fiad prvof of this we have only to turn to the Book :

:-cf Job:' Théré is a ‘difference between Job’s suffering and ours,
-in-that "Job suffered before the Incarnation, and so before Christ
had ‘coasuhiidted: his marriage to human suffering. Moreover,
Job’s sufferingsycame straight from Satan’s hands. Today Satan,
jealous of Christ's incarnation, unable to become man himself

THE HUMAN DESTINY 101

and so unite evil to humanity, makes use of men who give their
wills up to him to inflict suffering on others.

The misuse of suffering is sacrilege, a misuse and violation of
something in which the redeeming power of Christ’s love is
hidden, not unlike a sacrilege committed against the Sacred Host,
in fact a sacrilege against the Mystical Body, against Christ in
man. Our age has proved itself an age of Satanism. There has
_ never been any time in history when such diabolical cruelty has
been inflicted by men upon their fellow men, or when it has
been inflicted with such indifference and in such magnitude.

There has never been such blasphemy against suffering, the
true expression of Christ’s love, as we have seen in our times.
Modern man has made a multitudinous holocaust of human beings
to evil. Europe is the altar of a black Mass, the whole world a
witches’ sabbath of suffering.

Whenever great evil breaks out among men, evil which ex-
presses openly Satan’s hatred of the human race, it is answered
by great love, expressing God’s love for human creatures, through
man’s immolation in Christ, by the saints. The suffering which
a saint seems to choose for himself will often be one which is a
direct answer to some tremendous sin which is either character-
istic of his own generation or yet to come.

Thus St. Benedict Joseph Labre chose the apparently useless
life of a wandering beggar; he was destitute and he was dirty,
he ate scraps of refuse picked from garbage heaps, he was home-
less and verminous, he died from starvation and exhaustion. He
was the answer to the sensuality and gluttony of his own gen-
eration, but he was much more, he was “another Christ” living
through and atoning for the horrors of our concentration camps,
Christ taking that sin upon himself, overcoming that torment in
each one of its victims, in the person of the strange misunder-
stood beggar. And the life which St. Benedict Joseph chose exactly
foretold the suffering of those who were to come, those victims
of the concentration camps, who would be homeless, destitute,
half naked, verminous, starving, glad to find scraps of refuse to
eat, and, when they were not herded into gas chambers, dying
by hundreds and thousands of starvation and exhaustion.

102 GUILT

The self-inflicted suffering of a saint, which seems unreasonable,
fanatical and even repellent, is in reality an absolute necessity if
the whole world is not to perish, a necessity springing from the
crucifixion.

I have spoken of the suffering which a saint seems to choose,
because in fact the saint very seldom chooses anything: he merely
surrenders to his destiny, which as often as not he understands
as little as we do. In every circumstance, even such a matter as
his own temperament, he sees the will of God, and because he
is “a Christ” he does, not his own will, but that of his Father. As
Christ too, he is led by the Spirit, driven on by an inward com-
pulsion to acts which seem ludicrous to utilitarian Christians.
There is nothing cold and calculating in sanctity.

Because Christ lives in him and he makes no resistance to
Christ’s action in himself, the actions of a saint are prophecies.
Christ took upon himself not only the past, but the future of
suffering and sin; not only the memories of the ages streamed
through him, but everything that was to come. And so it is that if
we had eyes to see, we could read the future of mankind in the
earthly lives of saints now long in their glory.

Some of the saints have in fact prophesied, foretelling future
events, but more often the saint is one who does not know the
meaning of his own life; his actions are prophecies, but he does
not interpret them. He is usually unconscious of their prophetic
character and, far from wishing to reveal the secrets of his life
to the world, he wishes to hide them. The tongue of the prophet
Isaiah was cleansed by a burning coal; the tongues of the saints
are often incoherent or dumb, but their hearts are purified in
the crucible of love.

Some of the saints, like St. Francis of Assisi and St. John of the
Cross, have been poets in the literal sense; all the saints have been
poets as Christ was—in everything that they did, in their attitude
to life, in their total surrender to the Spirit, who is the fire and
the light of God and the wind of Heaven.

Because the saints are Christ led by the Spirit, all that seems
illogical and grotesque in their lives is in fact the living out of

THE HUMAN DESTINY 108

Christhood in the world. It is above all else a giving battle to evil,
even when they seem to be withdrawn from the world.

The madman who is really mad is alone, isolated in the midst
of men, because he is aware only of himself, he lives to and for
himself alone. But many people, even on the natural plane, enter
into communion with men by withdrawing from them. Madame
Curie, the discoverer of radium, dedicated her whole life to
the healing of human pain. Withdrawing from men, she suffered
profoundly in the intense sacrifices she made in the cause of
science. She was not led to work long hours behind locked doors,
and to live a hard, austere life, either by a masochistic love of
suffering or by a neurotic desire to escape from life. She was
consciously driven by a passion for science. In God’s plan she was
driven by the Spirit, to bring healing to men. Her solitude was her
communion with the world.

An artist is driven by the nature of his work to a solitude which
is often irksome to him; it is, in God’s plan, the condition of his
gift to the world.

In the same way the saint is led by the Spirit, by an inner
compulsion, to a life of contemplation, or a life of activity and
“usefulness,” or even a life of apparent uselessness and offence to
the worldling and the fastidious. But, in whatever the saint does
under compulsion of the Spirit, Christ’s plan is shown. In him
Christ faces the evil in the world and makes reparation for it.
' Through him, however mysteriously, he becomes one with all
men again. He faces guilt, led by the Spirit as he was led in his
historical life to face Satan in the wilderness.

It need hardly be said that the diversity among the saints is
without limit, for Christ wills to utter his love for men and to
enter into communion with them through every possible kind of
human creature. It follows that it would be very difficult to like
all the saints.

In spite of the fact that Christ lives in them all, they retain
their own characters, and they are even more varied than other
people, because whilst other people are limited by anxiety, and
fear and self-love, the saints, driven as they are by the spirit,

104 GUILT

have no limitations other than their natural ones; they are not
hindered by fear, or any form of self-love, from living fully, from
any experience offered to them. And unlike other men, who tend
as they grow older to be set in rigid grooves and incapable of
change, the saints are able to pass from one way of life to
another with astonishing mobility. The changes in their lives
often read like fairy-stories. St. Joan of Arc went from the life
of a shepherdess to that of a general in the French army; St.
Catherine of Siena, from a recluse to being the most effective
figure, man or woman, in the international affairs of her stormy
world; St. Ignatius, from being a soldier, became a scholar among
little boys, and afterwards a priest. The two brilliant little prin-
ces, Aloysius and Stanislaus, went from magnificence to be novices
in religion. St. Peter began his life as a fisherman and ended it
as a Pope.

There must be, among the diverse multitudes of the saints, some
whose personality we do not like. In this event we are apt to try
to compromise by saying that one must get underneath the
accidents, such as the particular saint’s way of self-expression,
to the kernel of the sanctity, to the essential character which,
we are usually able to persuade ourselves, must prove to be the
kind of character which fits our own preconceived idea of what a
- saint should be like.

No one has suffered more from this kind of dishonesty than St.
Teresa of Lisieux, especially among the English (the French have
stronger stomachs for sanctity ). The average Englishman requires
a special grace to love Teresa Martin as she is; mercifully, he
usually gets it. When he has got it, he will actually be able to think
of it, without nausea, as a “rose petal.”

Before receiving the rose petal he will concentrate as exclusively
as he can on the hardness of her hidden life, the iron that was
driven into her soul, and very likely he will flatter himself that by
his own insight he has discovered things which she was not
able to tell him herself. He will go so far as to say that the exterior
things of her personality tell him nothing about her, and might
well be suppressed. He imagines that he is scandalized by her,
but the fact is that he is scandalized by Christ, for choosing to

THE HUMAN DESTINY 105

become Teresa Martin, because Teresa Martin had a suburban
mind, and was true in every detail to what she was, a very
sentimental little French bourgeoise.

The imagery which she uses to describe her life of contem-
plation is not like that of St. Teresa of Avila, descriptive of the
gorgeous passion of a mature woman, but rather of the immature
romanticism of a genteel French girl, for whom a marriage to
which she willingly consents has been arranged by an adored
father. When it is realized that she did in fact endure almost un-
broken, lifelong aridity, and that on her side the surrender to
divine Love was really a countless multiplication of acts of will,
it seems to suggest that her life was an arranged marriage with
Heaven.

These things are baffling to the mediocre, and we try to ignore
them by saying that they tell us nothing of the essential saint.
Their tremendous importance is, however, not what they reveal or’
conceal about Teresa Martin, but what they tell us about Christ.

Not that Teresa wills to become Christ, but that Christ wills
to become Teresa.

Satan refused to bow down to the Son of God in the Incarna-
tion. Now Christ asks a great deal more than our adoration of
himself as the perfect man that he is in his human nature; he asks
for our recognition and welcoming of him in every kind of im-
perfect, unlikely, and—assessed by our own vanity—unsuitable
human creature.

We need to remind ourselves often that the likeness between
the saints and certain neurotics is not accidental, but is part of
God’s plan, of Christ’s identification of himself with all kinds
of men, with any man who does not resist him.

The compelling ‘fact is not that a suburban-minded girl or a
verminous tramp, or anyone else, will become Christ, but that
Christ will become’ the one or the other, and that through that
one he will utter the Word of God in language that Satan’s un-
conscious little imitators shut their sensitive ears against.

The fact that Christ’s choice in personalities brings home is that
there is no kind of person through whom Christ will not love the
world. If we dislike certain kinds of saints, it is simply because

106 GUILT

we dislike certain kinds of people. There are many kinds of people
from whom the mediocre shrink: borderline psychotics, insane
people, people in whom suffering is stripped naked in all its
ugliness, and whose suffering cannot be cured by our charity,
but is a perpetual. challenge to the much more difficult self-
giving, called compassion—people who are in fact suffering the
anguish and loneliness of Christ in Gethsemane, and from whom
the chalice may not pass. Like the disciples in the garden we
prefer to shut our eyes rather than to enter into this suffering
without being able to hide or alleviate it.

The charity of Christ on earth will not be filled up (“those
things that are wanting to the suffering of Christ”) until Christ
is accepted and contemplated in every kind of human being that
allows him place in itself.

We are reminded of our failure by the fact that there are saints
for everyone to dislike.

The Christhood of sanctity explains, as we have seen, the saint’s
attitude to sin and suffering. His words, which sometimes jar our
feeble minds and embarrass us, are not inspired by morbidity,
they are simply the expression of Christ’s love for us.

It is also the saint’s willingness to suffer which measures and
liberates his capacity for love. The saint has the capacity to
love with Christ's love. He has exchanged his heart for the heart
of Christ, his will for the will of Christ: in that is the secret of
his tremendous surrender to his destiny as man—Christhood.

St. Catherine of Siena has uttered the last word on this human
destiny of Christhood:

“But in no way does the creature receive such a taste of the
truth, or so brilliant a light therefrom, as by means of humble and
continuous prayer, founded on knowledge of herself and of God;
because prayer, exercising her in the above way, unites with God
the soul that follows the footprints of Christ crucified, and thus,
by desire and affection, and union of love, makes her another
Himself.”®

“Another Himself”!

* Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena (London: Kegan Paul, 1896).

Chapter X. GUILT AND SUFFERING

“Just as there grows no herb which can keep away death, so there exists
no simple means which can make a hard thing, as life assuredly is, an
easy matter.”—c. G. JUNG, “Love Problem of the Student”®

QUITE SIMPLY, suffering is the result of guilt, for guilt means that
we have broken the law of our being, we are in collision with
reality, and suffering follows inevitably. A man’s attitude to
suffering is therefore an estimate of his attitude to guilt. Again
and again people who have no personal conception of God, and
therefore no real sense of sin, or of the common guilt of mankind,
are heard to say, with genuine bewilderment, “Why should I
suffer?” or “Why should my child suffer?” They declare that they
have done no harm to anyone, thereby unconsciously proclaim-
ing that if they believed that they had done some harm to some-
one, and were guilty, there would be justice in their suffering,
or even in the suffering of their children.

On the other hand, the man of faith, who knows God; sees
suffering as something which he can use to expiate his own sins
and so come into closer union with God; and besides that he sees
in it a means of a closer communion with other men, for through
Christ who abides in him he can use his suffering to ease that
of mankind in general. Through offering himself in his suffering,
of whatever kind it is, he can be a “Christ” to the world, that
knows so little of Christ. He can reach out far beyond the

_ Stretch of his own short arms, to the stretch of the arms on the

cross, and bring down the tender pity of God upon men who
are far out of the range of his vision; perhaps outside the reach of

* In Contributions to Analytical Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace).
107

a re

108 GUILT

his imagination. Through this self-offering of Christ, through his
individual suffering, man, who lives the life of the risen Christ
who has overcome death and suffering, can in a spiritual sense
do what a risen and glorified body can do in a material sense.
He can cross the seas, walking upon the waters; he can pass
through prison walls and the walls of hospitals, institutions,
asylums, concentration camps: and wherever any man is in need,
is forgotten, isolated, seemingly out of reach of human mercy and
love, he can reach him with the love of Christ crucified. The in-
dividual man is not the helpless creature he often supposes him-
self to be. Often through what seem to be his limitations, his crip-
pling circumstances, his frustrations, he is able to extend the arms
of love illimitably. Again and again in human history, those in
whom Christ lives have been able to heal because they could not
be healed: and those who were immobile, tied down to one room,
one bed—prisoners, cripples, old, bedridden people—have been
in all places, everywhere, at once: present in Christ’s love.

Since men have covered their eyes from the light of God, and
in so far as they could, have shut their hearts against the entry of
Christ into them in order to escape from their destiny of Christ-
hood, there are few who realize the possibilities of suffering, and
many who repudiate it absolutely, at least as an idea. Few people
now have a clearly defined attitude to suffering, but those who
have are seldom so consistent in it as they think that they are.
Usually there is a big discrepancy between practice and theory.

Although it is the creed of mediocracy that the only sane and
healthy object of life is material well-being, in practice most
people impose a great deal of suffering and even austerity and
unnecessary suffering upon themselves. They do so, of course,
without realizing fully what they are doing. If they could be
compelled to face the facts and to discuss a subject so distasteful,
they would probably say that they do not resent suffering or even
self-denial when it is for some purpose, used as a means to an
end, but they abhor “useless suffering.”

They consider that all the suffering of the saints is useless, and
above all the voluntary austerity and self-denial of contemplative
saints. They have less condemnation for those who ministered

GUILT AND SUFFERING 109

to the sick or the destitute, such as St. Vincent de Paul, but it is

difficult for them to understand why he found it necessary to give’
up his own little property and to share the suffering of those he

came to help. Why not have kept his small income and provided

a few more loaves, instead of one more mouth to feed?

The modern mind, besieged though it is on every side by con-
flicting invisible forces, is a utility mind, and consequently able
to realize the effectiveness of suffering (as of anything else) only
when it shows material results. But for material results, what
sufferings man will endure!

Those business magnates, so envied by their clerks, who have
changed from office boys to millionaires, did not change with just
that sleepy inactivity with which the chrysalis changes into a
butterfly. There were, on the contrary, years of early rising on
cold, dank mornings; wearisome journeys in the rush hour, packed
together, straphanging; nauseating lunches in steamy, greasy,
overcrowded tea-shops; extra study at night, books brought home
from the office, and countless sweet and lovely and, to most
people, even necessary distractions forgone. And when the man
who has given up so much to be rich—such things as lying on his
back in a sunny field, reading poetry at his leisure, listening to
music, talking with friends, and so on—has achieved his am-
bition, how much petty suffering will hinder his enjoyment of
his riches, because in acquiring them he will have acquired a
habit of worry, of suspicion, of insomnia, of dyspepsia, and
probably a gastric ulcer!

Again, there is social success, a peculiar ambition more common
to women than to men, and one which demands, especially from
the type of woman to whom the very idea of mortification is
repellent, a quite frightening degree of self-denial and austerity.

She must be attractive, or at least she must conform to the
fashionable conception of attractiveness. I remember as a hideous
little child how a dressmaker, while gaily (but of course un-
consciously) snipping a little piece of flesh out of my neck while
fitting a dress, declared “II faut souffrir pour étre belle.” The
society woman must deny herself the most tempting dishes at

table, must allow her face to be drawn taut and stiff in packs.

110 : GUILT

of mud, her body to be pinched, slapped, boiled, pummelled and
rolled, her head to be fixed to a hot electric machine by the hair,
for hours on end. All this and more, not only occasionally, but
regularly and continually for years on end, and with the haunting
certainty of ultimately losing the battle.

But both the successful man and the society woman would be
surprised if anyone commiserated with them on their suffering
lives, and affronted if it were further suggested that their suffer-
ing revealed a strain of morbidity in their thinking. They would
justify their choice of endurance by pointing out that it is for an
end, and it attains the end. Provided that suffering attains a man’s
object, it is considered to be respectable; the fact that the object
itself may be selfish, base or foolish, is of no consequence, pro-
vided only that it be of this world.

Examples of this kind of motivated suffering could be multi-
plied indefinitely, but there are others which are embraced even
more readily, indeed eagerly, which are much more bewildering
to the onlooker, for the very object achieved seems to be suffering
too. In sport, it is difficult to decide where the pain ends and
the pleasure begins. There are certain sports which are beautiful
to watch and exhilarating to practise, such as cricket or skating
or horsemanship or sailing a boat—about these there is no mys-
tery, but there are others which are baffling. Amateur boxers are
as ready as professionals to be beaten and pummelled about the
body, and to have their faces smashed and pounded to pulp.
On sweltering summer days, hordes of cyclists race for hundreds
of miles, parched and panting, on their one day’s leisure in the

week. Even in St. Paul’s day, athletes were overcoming their —

appetites and denying themselves the joys of life to win at the
games—and St. Paul remarked that the end attained seemed
hardly worth the effort: “Every athlete must keep his appetites
under control, and he does it to win a crown that fades.”
However, man’s readiness to suffer goes deeper than the super-
ficial motive, and if we probe, we meet the Homing Toad again.
In his heart of hearts, even the sophisticated and cynical man
knows that suffering is a common burden, a load laid upon the
backs of all mankind, and one which is lightened for everyone

Courtesy of Pantheon Books

TERESA MARTIN

ae

GUILT AND SUFFERING 111

when anyone lends a willing shoulder, and made heavier for.
everyone when one man shrinks back from the effort. This ex-
plains the anger which enters into the attitude of hard-working
men towards those who are too nerveless and supine to welcome
the commonly accepted tests of manhood, even when these tests
are silly.

It explains, too, why those for whom life is made too easy at
the beginning, feel humiliated, and why, quite apart from the
possibility of superficial envy, other men often feel a grudge
against those who seem to them to have been given on easy
terms the things that they must get by the sweat of their brows.

Men want to prove themselves able to endure, even if they
must prove it in a way that on the surface seems absurd, and they
want to do this because even when they have lost sight of the
whole meaning of communion with others, they do want to
participate in other men’s lives, they want to be accepted and
esteemed and loved by their fellows, they are eager to prove that
they have the right to be one of them.

Even when a man’s values are all wrong and his ideals are awry,
he wants his money or his power to be got by his own struggle:
or a woman wants her social success or artificial beauty got by
her own endurance, in order to be entitled to her place in the
solidarity of the human race. A man may strive for a communion
with men which is made almost a sacrilegious communion by his
personal dispositions; but nevertheless what he really wants,
and is compelled by his nature to want, is communion.

In the degree in which the willingness to suffer, which is innate
in normal men, becomes un-selfseeking, it unites men with one
another and is the beginning of the communion which is fully
realized only in the saints.

There are professions and trades and labours which are voca-
tions to suffering in union with, and for, other men.

First there is the priest, whose life is a sacrifice offered for all
men. Then there are the doctor and the nurse, both of whom are
always ready to give up sleep or comfort or rest, to go to those in
need—ready too to risk any infection and to face any terror or
mutilation in the service of mankind. There are those who must

112 GUILT

live, as it were, in other men’s hands; whose success, even if it
be of a spiritual order, must be paid for in a suffering of poverty
far more terrible than material poverty, a poverty of not having
themselves, not having anything of their own—not time, or soli-
tude, or their thoughts, or even their senses: their hearing filled
always with other men’s troubles, their eyes with the face of
other people’s sorrows, all their words given to others without
stint for their comfort, their touch the perpetual touch of healing
and blessing.

Such a life of willing privation was lived by St. Francis de Sales,
of whom a modern writer says: “But the most revealing thing
about him is the description to be found in every life ever written
of St. Francis de Sales—he was accessible to all’; when he became
a Bishop, and an extremely popular Bishop, this meant that there
could not have been one moment of an eighteen-hour day which
he could claim for his personal delight. It is somehow more
difficult to imagine life on these terms, than one of splendid mira-
cles.”* It is on these terms that every modern Pope must live.

But in order to embrace humanity, a man may be obliged to
withdraw from humanity. Scholars, poets, artists, scientists, and
contemplatives, whose lives are lived in terms of universal love,
will usually have to pay their debt of suffering to the world and
enter into communion with men through detachment, as well as
through work. To give oneself to the world, to take all mankind
to one’s heart, may be the loneliest of experiences.

Among those who follow the humblest trades and whose lives
are filled up by manual labour, it is almost universal to take hard-
ship and suffering for granted, and everyone sees that the suffer-
ing of such men is useful to others, though few realize its
effectiveness in the supernatural order and its power to redeem.
If everyone realized that Christ is in himself, and offered his self-
sacrificing life of work and hardship that is taken for granted, to
expiate guilt, how swiftly the face of the earth would be changed!

Every day the miner goes down into the great caverns hewn
under the earth, and there with the sweat pouring down in rivu-
lets through the grime on his stripped body, he risks his life from

*G. B. Stern, Man Without Prejudice.

GUILT AND SUFFERING 113

moment to moment. The ship’s stoker sweltering at his furnace
in the tropical seas: the crews of submarines, firemen, and divers,
and all those whose service is hard and dangerous, touch the
point at which the ordinary suffering which is taken for granted,
and hardly recognized as such, becomes sacrifice, a mysterious
participation in the priesthood of the human race, through which
God is glorified in men. This too is taken for granted in the life
and the death of the soldier:

Yes. Why do we All, seeing of a soldier, bless him? bless
Our redcoats, our tars? Both of these being, the greater part,
But frail clay, nay but foul clay. Here it is: the heart,
Since, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess

That, hopes that, makesbelieve, the men must be no less;

It fancies, feigns, deems, dears the artist after his art;

And fain will find as sterling all as all is smart,

And scarlet wear the spirit of war thére express.

Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through;
He of all can handle a rope best. There he bides in bliss

Now, and séeing somewhére some m4n do all that man can do,

For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,

And cry ‘O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:

Were I come o’er again’ cries Christ ‘it should be this.’°

On the whole, it can be said truly that even though the most
widely professed creed of mankind today is to seek for personal
happiness and to avoid suffering, nearly everyone who professes
this creed takes upon himself a good deal of voluntary suffering,
and admires other men for their powers of and willingness for
endurance.

He justifies himself by the plea of usefulness, but there is no
such thing as useless suffering.

Suffering does something to the man who suffers, not merely
something for him.

It is quite impossible to suffer anything, no matter what it is,
and not be affected by it. The effect may be good or it may be bad.
One man will be made new and whole by suffering; another will
be destroyed by it. In its turn, the character given to a man by

® Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Soldier” in Poems.

114 GUILT

suffering will affect everyone with whom he comes into contact.
It leaves a stamp on the soul, a seal, as if it were the sacramental
of some mysterious force, like the chrism in Confirmation; but a
sacramental which can be used by the evil spirit as well as by the
Spirit of Love. It may disfigure; it may make beautiful; one or the
other it will do.

No one ever lives who has not at some time or other the
possession of suffering; it is the one thing man possesses by his
own right, and it is certainly essential for any achievement or
success that he desires. It seems, too, that he cannot have any-
thing else essential to his happiness, unless he has suffering with
it—above all that greatest essential of all, to be able to love.
Directly a man loves, he suffers.

No matter what joy is granted to a man on earth, suffering will
balance the scale that weighs it out to him. If a man imagines that
he is experiencing joy, but without any accompanying suffering,
the answer is that he does not really know what it is, or can be,
to experience joy.

No man is ever unaffected by suffering. It goes to the roots
of everyone whom it touches; it either embitters him or enlarges
him with divine compassion. It makes him hate, or it makes him
love, and equally, the seal it has set on his soul makes him either
hated or loved in return. A man’s strength and his power to
strengthen other men can be measured by how much he can
suffer well.

By suffering a man is either made a slave to himself or he is
set free—suffering has a germ of effectiveness in itself, as virile
as the germ of life in wheat. This germ of life is Christ’s redemp-
tive love. In itself, suffering is without value; worse than that,
it is destructive. But Christ used suffering to redeem the human
race. He did not try to escape it, though he could have redeemed
man without it. On the contrary, he gave himself to it from his
birth to his death; he gave his body and mind and his soul to it;
he literally took it to his heart; he sowed it with the seed of his
redemptive love. That is the germ of life in suffering.

Man, who is sinful, and who inherits original sin, cannot
escape from suffering. His attempts to do so add to suffering. His

GUILT AND SUFFERING 115

futile struggle to resist must break down sooner or later. It
succeeds, if it succeeds in anything, only in the tragedy of his
refusal to receive the seed of redemptive love into the dry dust
of his heart.

The widespread neurosis of our days is largely caused by the
attempt to resist suffering, because it involves an attempt to resist
the redemptive love that is in it.

The man who tries to resist suffering succeeds only in frus-
trating that power of love. He makes a futile attempt to resist
that in which it is concealed and given. He lifts his puny litéle
arms to try to hold back the torrent of divine love, in order to
avoid the one thing that he can never escape, and which hides its
own healing within itself. It is not surprising that in such an
impact man is broken.

Suffering is a mystery. Not one to be dismissed or to remain un-
examined. It is man’s only achievement, his only contribution to
his' own life. Yet it can be a creative thing, not only a destructive
one. Evil is its cause, but because Christ has given it the power
of his redemptive love, it can redeem evil.

To understand what we can about this it is not enough to gaze
stupefied at the wounds it has inflicted upon men, or to consider
its effect on those who neither wholly repudiate nor accept it.
We must go much further, we must see what happens to those
human beings who try to escape altogether, who have a definite
will not to suffer; and on the other hand what happens to the
saints, who, without conditions or reservation, are in the fullest
measure willing to suffer.

Chapter X1. FRUSTRATION

“To love belongs the depth and loyalty of feeling, without which love
is‘not love, but mere caprice: true love will always engage in lasting,
responsible ties. It needs freedom only for the choice, but not for the
accomplishment. Every true deep love is a sacrifice. A man sacrifices
his possibilities, or to put it better the illusion of his possibilities. If the
sacrifice is not made his illusions hinder the realization of deep re-
sponsible feeling, and accordingly the possibility of experiencing real
love is also denied him.”—c. G. JUNG, “Love Problem of the Student”®

Ir 1s the reiterated complaint of ego-neurotics that life has frus-
trated them. There are two words which are always hovering on
their tongues—‘Fulfillment” and “Satisfaction.” They are ob-
sessed by the idea that they have been prevented by an unkind
fate from “satisfying” their deepest emotions, “fulfilling” their
humanity. In the details as well as in the broad sweep of life, they
have, so they believe, been frustrated at every turn. They have
been denied the opportunity of revealing, let alone developing,
their talents. They have been passed over at work, and in any case
have never been able to obtain any suited to their temperament
or their ability.

For some mysterious reason, all their human relationships are
unsatisfactory and invariably bring them more distress than
happiness. Above all, they think, they have been denied the
opportunity to love. While they imagine that their capacity for
love is deeper and more sensitive than that of others, its fulfillment
has been denied to them. In short, life has frustrated them at
every turn.

" © In Contributions to Analytical Psychology.
116

FRUSTRATION 117

Their real tragedy is not that life has frustrated them, but that
they have frustrated life. Not that love has been denied to them,
but that they have denied themselves to love.

To discover what is at the root of this kind of human un-
happiness, we must look for symptoms common to all the sufferers.
They are easily found—hesitation, anxiety, indecision—all point-
ing to one thing, fear; all means to one end, self-protection. The
ego-neurotic never takes a risk that he can possibly avoid; there-
fore, he never willingly goes out of himself to meet life; he
shrinks back from every adult experience. By constant delays, by
never being able to make up his mind, by magnifying all the real
and imaginary difficulties in every possible course open to him,
by putting off every decision until too late, he is able to avoid the
minimum of risk involved in taking any positive action at all.

We have seen that everyone is willing to suffer in the measure
of his desire for communion with other men. But anything which
involves co-operation with others, let alone communion, is pre-
cisely what ego-neurotics cannot face. It is often said of them that
they “dare not face life,” and that is both literally and metaphor-
ically true; they do not want to show their face, they do not
want to show themselves to the world. They are tortured by a
painful self-consciousness, a wish to be hidden, if necessary even
by becoming part of the faceless and voiceless mediocracy, drift-
ing through years of accepted defeat to the grave.

At the core of this tragedy is this: the ego-neurotic is haunted
by a deep inward humiliation, which is not thought but felé in
the roots of his being, and consists in a profound doubt of his own
potency as a human being. He does not want to put himself to the
test because he is afraid to be found wanting. He is afraid to know
himself and to be known, and if he cannot overcome this fear,
he does at last become in reality what he imagines himself to be,
impotent before life, helpless in the face of conquest, incapable
of loving, and so unable to win love for himself. A failure as a
human being.

The person who will not take any risk to enter into contact with
others, to pay his part of the debt of human conflict and suffering,
inhibits his capacity for love, until it actually becomes so weak

118 GUILT

from sheer inanition that it is no longer a power in his life at
all, and cannot be his driving force to experience.

Each step forward in life, with the risk and the self-giving
involved in it, strengthens the emotional sinews of a human
creature and is the remote preparation for the supreme surrender
to love. This process, and it is a process of self-revelation as well
as of co-operation, begins at the first children’s party, if not before,
and it is significant that the game which extroverted children
delight in and introverted children dread is hide-and-seek. It is
only one example of how children’s games, like children’s stories
and fantasies, show us the secrets of human nature.

There are two ways of playing hide-and-seek. In one of them
all the players hide excepting one, who remains, with closed eyes,
in the place chosen as “home” while he counts a hundred, and
then starts seeking. When he finds one of the hidden players, that
player must try to escape from his hiding-place and to run home
before he is caught by the seeker. The first who is caught becomes
the seeker next time.

The other method is played in a dark house, without lights.
One only hides, and all the other players seek. As they find him,
one by one they join him in the hiding-place, remaining quite
silent. The one who is the last to be left seeking will be the first
to hide next time.

Those who are not able to imagine the feelings of a child who
shrinks from hide-and-seek—feelings ranging from acute shyness
to actual terror—would do well to read Graham Greene’s short
story in which a little boy dies of fear during the game of hide-
and-seek at a party, while his twin brother holding his hand in
the darkness experiences the other’s terror in himself, and it lives
on in him when the brother is dead. Could we experience one
another's fears and doubts through the compassion of our human
brotherhood, we would go a long way towards healing the neu-
rosis of the world; we should at least know its reality.

After the children’s party there is school, and at school the fear
of being afraid, as well as of showing fear, develops into an acute
suffering. Already the process that is going to be repeated all
through life begins; the child is asked to stand up to things which

FRUSTRATION 119

are more than he can stand up to unafraid. He is asked to hide
every natural feeling, and to bring a good face to the world—
the horrible little world into which he has suddenly been flung,
while he is still quivering inwardly from the separation from his
home, his parents and his babyhood. All the “tests” are designed
expressly to show what he is trying to hide—that he is a milksop
and a coward; and because he already believes the falsehood
that to be sensitive and to be afraid is to be a coward and a failure,
it becomes his great object to hide the shame of being himself.

The same pattern goes on when the child must go into the
world of adult life. In our civilization, entering into manhood
means again being put to a test which is far beyond a test of
nature, and demands unnatural qualities. The young man or
woman is faced now with his personal conquest of the material-
ism, the callousness and the false values of the world; and he is
still crippled by his delusions—his fear of being afraid, his fear
of being unable to shoulder responsibilities, his fear of failing
in the drastic tests that must come to every man and woman who
falls in love, and above all his fear of being stripped of his
garments and revealed as he imagines himself to be, impotent in
the face of life, incapable of the fullness of living which is the
expression of love. The ego-neurotic shrinks from life and refuses
to take risks, because he is unwilling to put himself to the
test.

Until he is put to the test, terrible though his doubt is—his
secret lack of self-confidence and self-esteem—it still is a doubt; it
is not acertainty. He prefers to forgo the fullness of life, rather than
risk the final humiliation of knowing himself as a failure for
certain.

He is afraid to know himself and to be known. To this fear love
is the ultimate challenge. For the first condition of love is the
total surrender of the secret of self. To love is to know and to be
known. Love reveals to himself, and to her whom he loves, exactly
what a man is; it reveals also his potentialities, his power to
suffer, his capacity for responsibility and for joy, his ability for
self-sacrifice.

The attempt to escape from the self-revelation and self-knowl-

120 GUILT

edge of love is the key to countless human tragedies and wasted
lives.

It is often an instinctive self-protection against the risk of fall-
ing in love that keeps young men, and even old men, fixed in
adolescence. There are women who, rather than risk proving
themselves unable to attract love, will adopt a dowdy way of
dressing and an anti-social attitude to the world; they do not
“make the best of themselves,” because if the best of themselves
failed, they would taste the humiliation of certainty. It has been
said, and I believe truly, that a woman’s hat, the hat that she
dares to wear, is a fair criterion of her secret estimate of herself.

There are many forms of this sad escape from the perils of
love. Sometimes it takes the form of an abuse and misuse of
religion, and women who have no religious vocation (that involves
the most complete self-surrender of all) invent for themselves a
kind of pseudo-companionate-marriage with the Lord in the
world, or an extraordinary mission in life, which precludes ful-
filling their ordinary obligations, but eludes definition which
might commit them to any self-surrender at all, and is itself a
lifelong delaying action.

Many women who dare not surrender themselves to the love
of a man find it necessary all the same to have a man or men
in their lives with whom they have emotional or intense relation-
ships, which are rendered safe for themselves by some circum-
stance. There are women, for example, who invariably fall in love
with married men, and among the pious there are those who foster
a merciless devotion to a sympathetic priest.

Timid men are more afraid of love than women are. What is
more pitiful than the middle-aged bachelor facing the depression
of a lonely, homeless and childless old age, because he always
set his standard of living—with a wife—too high for there to be
any serious risk of his ever reaching it?

There are women who make a hobby of making and breaking
engagements, and others who, for so long as the man’s patience
holds out, invariably postpone their wedding when the date
draws near.

Sometimes the fear of impotence translates itself quite crudely

FRUSTRATION 121

and simply onto a physical plane, but with the most baffling in-
tricacies of mental, spiritual and hereditary forces behind it, not
to mention complications of environment and education. Thus
we have those young men who, without an obvious motive,
commit suicide on their wedding eve.

Again there are many homosexuals who have become so be-
cause they were unable to risk the self-sacrifice which is involved
in meeting the far greater responsibility of natural love.

Homosexuality, like scrupulosity, is a very big and complicated
subject, which it is impossible to explore thoroughly in any book
that is not devoted solely to it. The belief which used to prevail
that there is what Edward Carpentier described as an “Inter-
mediate Sex”—made up of persons in whom the sexes are so
intermingled that they may be said to be, psychologically, both
man and woman—is denied by most modern schools of psy-
chology. They insist that homosexuality, like other abnormalities
and neuroses, can always be traced to early, perhaps infantile,
experience, and therefore can usually be cured by psychoanalysis.
There is a surprisingly high number of recorded cures to support
this theory, but it is nevertheless not yet proved.

I am inclined to the view that there are many causes of homo-
sexuality, and that there are rare, very rare, cases when sex is so
intermingled that—though this is an unnatural thing in itself—
it may be a particular individual’s nature to combine the two sexes
in himself in the way that makes him homosexual. I do not mean
merely that the man and woman are both in him, for this applies
' to everyone; everyone who is normal has ingredients of both man
and woman in him, usually well balanced against each other.
The type of homosexuality I speak of is one in which the psyche,
the whole invisible part of the person, his or her mind and char-
acter and emotions, belong to one sex, and his or her body to the
other. Thus one meets a woman who has unquestionably a man’s
psyche; or the reverse, a man with a woman’s psyche. It is true
that in this case there are usually masculine characteristics in the
woman’s body, and feminine ones in the man’s; but I think that
these are largely developed through the influence of the psyche,
and of course accentuated by the manner of dress. Just as a

123 GUILT

neurotic may attain to sanctity through his neurosis, a homo-
sexual may do so through his homosexuality, for he is fated to a
life of great loneliness, and not infrequently to one of very great
love, which he can never satisfy; to attain sanctity he would have
to deny himself the physical expression of his love altogether, and
to some extent any expression of it which would disturb the
life of another or impose too great a strain on himself.

Even if the homosexuality is not innate, but has a cause in
infantile experience, if it is established it can still be accepted as
a neurosis and sanctified; and as many homosexuals of this kind
‘have a great power to love, it may be their vocation actually to
be power-centres of selfless love in the world.

But there is another kind of homosexual far more numerous—
the self-lover, who seeks not to give but to get from every human
relationship; the sensation-hunter, the man or woman who under-
stands love only in terms of sensuality and self-gratification on a
physical plane. -

Natural love points to marriage; marriage, not only to daily
small, sometimes big, acts of self-denial, but to great acts of self-
giving, tenderness ad restraint in the expression of love. It leads
on to imparting life, one’s own life, and then to the whole
responsibility of family life.

Not surprisingly, the homosexual whose perversion springs from
self-love is nearly always mean as well as cowardly; he not only
does not want to give anything, but he does not want to share
anything, even his sensual pleasure. There are no inescapable ties
or obligations in a homosexual relationship; no risks of unwanted
children.

It is true that there are many homosexuals who do marry, but
the story of their married life is usually one of failure, for the
reasons I have mentioned, and for another—namely, vanity.
Homosexuality, whatever the cause, is often complicated, in the
case of men, by physical impotence, and this deepens the bitter
inward humiliation of all ego-neurosis. To be impotent before a
woman is more than most men can bear, and even though homo-
sexuals may have procreated children, they usually go through
long and humiliating periods of impotence, .

PRUSTRATION 123

The usually quite unbalanced response to them (at first) from
other men with whom they enter into homosexual relations, is a
tremendous salve to their aching vanity, as well as to their in-
evitable physical obsession with sex, which they cannot satisfy.

‘Self-love is pitifully apparent in the stormy relationships which
always result when a marriage has been broken by homosexuality.
Each side demands from the other unnatural excitement and sen-
sation, which they both crave as the drunkard craves for alcohol.
There are always sordid quarrels about money, incessant demands
for it from one or the other; and the relationship, sunk as it is in
self-love, a mental and physical mutual masturbation, breaks up
in acts of violence and spite, and sometimes insanity.

There are the examples, sufficiently well known to cite, of
Verlaine and Rimbaud, of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas—
stabbed and pocked with hysterical scenes, quarrels, spite, part-
ings and reunions, orgies of drinking, of gluttony, and of almost
unbelievable bursts of conceit; and finally, between Verlaine and
Rimbaud, shooting!

But in addition to the cases in which there are definite “liaisons,
there are the homosexuals who ask for no “love” at all on the
spiritual plane, and simply regard other human beings as a means
to physical pleasure or relief for themselves. Those of their own
sex are safer and cheaper than those of the opposite sex. Not only
do they in these casual relationships demand little in the way of
material recompense, but less still in the ways that demand per-
sonal effort, courtesy, manners or refinement.

‘There are men, too, who deny themselves friendship with
women altogether, because their company is a challenge to their
manhood which makes many small demands on them involving
effort, as well as the menace of a potential emotional demand, to
which they feel unable to respond.

..There are many of these unhappy, hesitating people, who do
manage to avoid all intimate relationships throughout their lives,
and with them not only all responsibilities and some kinds of
suffering, but also all the delight and lasting joys in life.

.. But this is not the case with every ego-neurotic. Sometimes
ego-neurotics do marry or form other human contacts in spite of

a”?

124 GUILT

themselves, but they do not find happiness in them, and they
certainly do not give it. The same sense of being frustrated and
unfulfilled haunts them as that which haunts the obviously lonely.
They are in fact equally lonely.

The reason for this is twofold; it is because the ego-neurotic,
though unable to give love, makes an unreasonable demand for
it, and he demands it on his own terms—not from God, who alone
could give it in the measurelessness that he wants, but from other
human beings, who are as helpless as he is to give love at all unless
they give God’s love.

He demands love and esteem in limitless measure, and “for
myself alone.” The need to be loved and encouraged is an ob-
session, and this because the inward shame and humiliation, the
profound and never finally tested doubt of self, causes a continual
need of reassurance. Without reassurance from one hour to the
next, life becomes a torment.

This terrible need for reassurance translates itself into many
forms. There is the boaster and romancer, constantly blowing his
own trumpet, who in the absence of anyone else to do it for him,
tries to reassure himself of his own worth. On the other hand,
there is the person who is always disparaging himself, always
apologizing for his existence, and so extorting reassurance. The
more aggressive sufferer demands open and blatant flattery and
spends his life provoking it. Aggression is very often the ex-
pression of the inward helplessness of ego-neurosis. For not only
does the sufferer feel the need for love and esteem, but he feels
all other people to be competitors; he cannot hold up his head
if he does not feel that he is the only one who is loved, or the
only one who is esteemed; so weak is his grasp on life in the
psychological sense, that he cannot bear—or does not dare—to
share love and esteem with anyone, in case there is not enough
for himself.

Sometimes, feeling that he is not getting the love and esteem
that he hungers and thirsts for, the ego-neurotic becomes openly
aggressive; he feels anger and even hatred for the person who, as
he imagines, by not giving him what he needs in the impossible

FRUSTRATION 125

measure in which he demands it, causes him to suffer—the one
thing he is trying to avoid.

In extreme cases he imagines that in everything the other person
says or does not say, there is an expression of the contempt which
he really feels for himself. It is noticeable that nearly every per-
secution mania begins in self-persecution.

Almost more pitiful is the person who always tries to placate;
who, in order to be liked, always flatters others; who makes him-
self servile in order to be indispensable.

Once the suffering that is hidden in this need for reassurance
is understood, many things that seemed ludicrous and grotesque
in human nature are seen in their real pathos. It is very often the
cause of promiscuity and immorality. Your Don Juan who at-
tempts to seduce woman after woman is not necessarily the great
lover he would like to be; he may well be the man who cannot
love and who is driven by his tormenting fear that his power of
attraction is failing too.

Girls and women who secretly doubt that anyone could love
them for themselves are often willing to have “love affairs” with
as many men as they can, only to keep the illusion that the
physical pleasure they can oxer wins them some kind of love, and
is some salve to their vanity.

A further peculiarity of humiliated human beings is that they
are unable to believe in the reality of another’s love if they have
it, and while on the one hand they are continually asking for
reassurance, on the other hand they refuse to believe it when it
is given. Once again aggression creeps in, for convinced as they
are that they are in fact unlovable, unesteemable, they attribute
ulterior motives to those who proffer love to them.

Thus the person who has forced his service and his flatteries on
another, will turn on him in the end and declare that he is
exploited; the girl who has used her body to attract will upbraid
the man who has succumbed to her, on the grounds that he has
treated her as an unpaid prostitute; and equally, married ego-
neurotics will declare that their husband or wife has just such
motives and no real love. In plain words the humiliated egoist

126 GUILT

wishes to give nothing at all, for the inordinate love that he
demands.

There is yet another aggravating cause for the sense of being
unsatisfied of which the person who has failed in his human
relationships always complains: he imagines that being satisfied
by life is being sated by this life.

He is conscious of the terrible emptiness of emotional starva-
tion, made all the more intolerable by the fact that it was
originally self-induced; and, as in physical starvation, the starving
person is too weak to be able to digest the food he needs. Most
boys pass through a phase in early adolescence in which they
consider that they have not been fed unless they are stuffed, sated
and sickened. People who, through fear of adult responsibility,
remain psychologically adolescent ask the same from their emo-
tional life. They want to be replete, filled, even sickened, and in
this they imagine they would be “satisfied”!

But while the ego-neurotic’s appetite for emotional satisfaction
grows bigger and bigger, his emotional capacity grows smaller
and smaller, and he seeks to satisfy it with less and less. While his
craving to be loved grows, his power of loving shrinks. There is
always a hierarchy in love; in the human failure it is a descending
one; when the nearest anyone can approach to loving at all is only
to need to be reassured, and to be unable to give love, it is tragic
to watch this descent. From the supernatural plane, which means
the love of united body and soul, it descends to merely the body,
and from that sometimes to the possessions of the supposedly
beloved. Women who have failed in their human relationships are
often seen giving the highest love of which they are still capable
to dogs; and men sometimes give it to food. It is not only in direct
personal relationships that love operates; it is the one means to
fulfillment in any life, whether that life is lived for one other
person or one little family, or for multitudes—perhaps of people
who will not be known in the body in this world.

The tremendous challenge of love, the challenge to surrender
to the stripping of Christ, to know and to be known, comes on
other planes as well as the emotional; it is equally the problem
of the celibate and the dedicated artist, the contemplative, and

FRUSTRATION 127

everyone else. The surrender of the secret of self is the condition
for the potency of every kind of human giving and taking of love. ©

Fear of risk, of self-surrender and self-revelation, operates in
the same way on intellectual, spiritual and artistic levels as it does
on emotional levels. Many pictures are not painted, many sculp-
tures are not made, many books are not written, because the men
and women who could have created them cannot bear to face
themselves stripped naked in their work, or allow others to gaze
upon the humiliating secret of self.

Again and again they escape, just as the victim of scrupulosity
escapes from self-seeing, through a destructive passion for self-
perfection, or a paralyzing state of indecision.

The world is full of brilliant people whose brilliance comes to
nothing, of naturally spiritual people whose spirituality comes to
nothing; of people who spend their whole lives searching for a
motivating ideal or faith, but who, in order that they may delay
their surrender to it indefinitely, cultivate and foster a never-
ending series of intellectual doubts and difficulties, because belief
inevitably weds thought to action, commits the believer to the
risk of love, and forms in him, as the flower is formed in the bud,
a pattern of irrevocable decisions for the future.

Pierre Janet writes: “We have within us special forms of
activity whose precise purpose it is to constitute new tendencies
competent to function in the future. Thus the realistic tendencies
which comprise will and belief, organise tendencies to action. To
take a decision is to organise a particular grouping of actions and
words, to organise it so strongly that it becomes capable of func-
tioning regularly for years to come.

“To believe something is nothing else than to form the decision
that we shall act in a certain way when certain circumstances
arise.”*

The real cause of frustration, of the lack of fulfillment and the
failure of human beings as human beings, is the will not to suffer.

In proportion to our willingness to suffer we succeed as human
beings; we fail in proportion to our will not to suffer. This, because

* Pierre Janet, Psychological Healing (London: George Allen and
Unwin).

128 GUILT

it is the will to accept suffering which liberates the capacity to
love, and on the capacity to love, and on that alone, our fulfillment
as human beings depends.

This seems to suggest that the will to accept suffering, far from
being a symptom of morbidity, is the primary condition of
psychological life. — ,

Even a mediocre person may come to realize that willingness
to suffer, to make efforts and to overcome self-consciousness, is a
condition for joy, so that to accept one is to accept the other;
similarly, the saint’s willingness to suffer includes his acceptance
of joy. He in no way resembles the morbid type of pious person
who tries to exclude the joys of religion from his life; on the con-
trary, life for the saint means welcoming both the fasting in the
wilderness and the feast with the bridegroom.

There is a tiny episode in the life of St. Teresa of Lisieux when
she was a child, which sums up the saint’s attitude, and it is
shown up more vividly by being compared to a contrasting
episode in the childhood of an ego-neurotic. The latter I can
vouch for, for I was the ego-neurotic. Let it come first.

Christmas parties were always a torment—above all, the mo-
ment when the gifts were distributed from the Christmas tree, for
this meant being called out before all the others, made the centre
of attention, and being obliged to raise one’s voice and face to
the hostess to thank her. In vain, on this occasion, did I hide
behind the others, hoping to escape. I had fallen in love with the
fairy doll on the tree and longed for it, but I had reason to think
that if I had it I might be obliged to give it away to a relation
who was ill. Better to forgo the joy of possession than first to go
through the ordeal of shyness, and after that, the suffering of loss.
When my turn came and I was asked what I would like from the
tree, I said, “I don’t want anything.”

St. Teresa of Lisieux was also brought, when she was a small
girl, to choose one from a display of presents. How differently she
answered! “I choose everything,” she said.

How well this illustrates the difference between the ego-
neurotic and the saint. The ego-neurotic really means, “I want
only what I can have without suffering”; but the saint means,

FRUSTRATION 129

“I will accept everything, the suffering that is inseparable from
the joy, and the joy that is the crown of suffering.”

The picture of those in whom the capacity for love is feeble is _
a depressing one, but there is the tremendous comfort that though —
it may be so feeble as to seem dead, the capacity for love is not
really dead in any living human being, for every human being is
made in the image of God, who is love.

The complaints of discouraged people are never heard on the
tongues of the saints; not one of them has ever exclaimed that life
had cheated or frustrated him, however much it may have seemed
that it had to the onlooker. Circumstances‘do not frustrate saints.
The universal circumstance of guilt does not frustrate them. Dif-
ferent though they have been in every external detail, there is no
saint in Heaven who did not fulfill his human nature on earth.

That which countless millions of unhappy, frustrated people
long to achieve and cannot, every saint has achieved, and for
every broken human failure, there is a saint like enough to himself
to show him his own way to glory.

Chapter Xu. ACCEPTANCE

“Love has more than one element in common with religious conviction;
it demands an unconditioned attitude and it expects complete sur-
render. Only that believer who yields himself wholly to his god par-
takes in the manifestation of divine grace. Similarly, love reveals its
highest mysteries and wonder only to him who is capable of uncon-
ditioned surrender and loyalty of feeling. Because this is so hard, few
indeed of mortal men can boast of achieving it. But just because the
most devoted and truest love is also the most beautiful, let no man
seek that which could make love easy.”—c. G. JuNG, “Love Problem
of the Student”®

A sainT is one who is continually and always aware of the being
of God, even when his awareness consists in a sense of having
lost or been abandoned by him. It is this objective love of God
and this continual awareness of his being which makes the saint’s
attitude to guilt different to that of all other men, and which
makes his realization of it an incomparably greater suffering to
him than it is to any other.

This suffering as it is experienced by a saint is unimaginable to
those who know it only as the misery of scrupulosity, the obses-
sion of wounded vanity, or the slow festering of remorse. Yet it is
only the saint who accepts the realization and responsibility of
guilt and is not broken by it.

He makes no attempt to escape. He wishes to participate in the
world’s sorrow; not only in those exquisite refinements of suffering
which may be peculiar to sanctity, but in the common suffering
of all mankind: in the whole world’s fear and labour and pain,
because knowing himself to be a sinner, he acknowledges his
personal responsibility for the suffering of mankind. He knows

° In Contributions to Analytical Psychology.

180

ACCEPTANCE 181

that every sin of his adds to the total of human misery. He knows
that every man owes his tears for his own sins to every other man.
He acknowledges his debt, which must be paid in the coin of
suffering. The rest of men refuse to acknowledge a debt at all.

On the purely natural level, there is a type of man (one not far
from megalomania) who is prolific in generosity, who is never
more exalted than when he is providing sparkling entertainment
and lavish hospitality, who grudges nothing that he spends on
buying alleluias for himself, but who at the same time ignores
his obligations, and leaves those people to whom he owes money,
or for whom he is responsible, to be in want.

Such a man has his counterpart in those pseudo-saints who,
though spiritual by temperament, have not taken one step on the
stony road of sanctity with their shoes off. It is because a genuine
saint among them all unwittingly reminds these people of their
debt, that they hate and persecute him. They are willing to bear
suffering which seems to come straight from God’s hand, and they
are willing to bear that which they inflict upon themselves as a
means of escape from consciousness of personal guilt, and a prop
to their complacency. But they will not confess themselves to be
as other men, sinners, and therefore will not humble themselves to
accept suffering at the hands,of other human beings. They are
willing to suffer in condescension but not in participation.

The saint's attitude is in complete contrast. When he suffers at
the hands of his fellow men he bears no resentment, indeed he
considers, if he analyses the situation at all, that he is receiving
an alms from them with which to pay his debt to mankind for
his own sins. He thinks it mere justice that he should suffer.

Obviously these two opposite attitudes have a profound effect
on the characters of these two kinds of men.

Nothing so aggravates suffering as a sense of its injustice. Even
the pin-pricks which most people accept as the fair wear and tear
of life fester in those who feel it to be an affront to their egoism
that they should suffer anything at all. Their resentment swells to
exactly the size of their self-love, for self-pity measures self-love.

The bigger a man’s self-love is, the smaller is the thing which ©
can make him suffer. He sees slights and insults to himself in

182 GUILT

everything, not only in everything that other people do and say,
but in everything that other people have and are. If they have
more wealth than he has, or more talent or charm, if they have
the indefinable quality which makes them popular; above all if,
without having any of the things which might attract others
through self-interest, they have something in themselves which
makes them loved, the egoist who lacks these qualities becomes
infected by envy.

Envy is literally a poison, not for the mind only, but for the
body too. We are not merely using a figure of speech when we
speak of evil passions making bad blood. They do. A great deal
of neurosis is accelerated by physical fatigue, resulting from
blood poisoned by envy.

The man who is warped by ideas of injustice and persecution is
profoundly irritated by sanctity. Above all, he is irritated by the
saint’s attitude to suffering. In him, he sees a man who is not
humiliated by contempt, who is not degraded by poverty, and
who even rejoices in suffering. Worst of all, he rejoices not in
spite of, but because of his personal suffering.

The selfish man, who cannot even be resigned to the ordinary
adverse circumstances of life, cannot hide from himself or others
the humiliating fact that he is a failure as a human being, unless
he can rationalize his own nerveless inability to wrest some good
from adversity. Consequently the saint is a complete denial of
everything that could save his face. To the egoist sick with self-
love and self-pity, the irrepressible joy of a saint in the midst
of suffering seems to be an irresponsible burst of laughter at his
own expense.

When the sources of a neurosis are exposed, the sum total of
them will often seem to be so petty, that it is difficult to believe
that such trivialities could have twisted a human life into the
grotesque shape they have. Childish jealousies, superficial criti-
cisms, thoughtless, unintended snubs, trifling humiliations will
suppurate in the darkness of the subconscious until they grow
into running sores of self-pity, which poison the whole personality.

It will be explained that these trifles are not in themselves the
cause of the disaster, but their effect on emotion, appetites, in-

ACCEPTANCE 188

stincts, needs, already in conflict. So differently do the saints
react to the same things, however, that we are compelled to look
for some other explanation. All the more so, because the saints
have the same emotions, appetites and drives that other people
have, the same universal inheritance, the same burden of racial
memories and dark and terrible impulses, the same reasons for
being in conflict with themselves.

Moreover, history shows that no saint has ever been canonized
who did not suffer, in an overwhelming degree, those very things
which twist and warp others; yet these same things have had
precisely the opposite effect on their personalities. I speak of
canonized saints, because although there are many saints in
Heaven who have not been canonized, and many saints on earth
who will not be, they are not helpful to this enquiry because we
do not know anything about them.

A canonized saint, on the other hand, can have no secrets. He
has become almost cruelly the possession of all men. He has been
submitted to the most thorough and gruelling examination that
has ever been devised, one beside which trial by the O.G.P.U.
fades into pastel shades. His actions, his words, his niotives, his
supernatural experiences have been subjected to microscopic
examination, by theologians, scientists and specialists of every
kind. No Freudian psychiatrist ever brought such withering
cynicism to the visions and ecstasies of the saints as the devil’s
advocate brings. No secret agents have ever competed with those
who remorselessly search out every secret of the saint’s life for
the Vatican.

Quite literally the canonized saint has been stripped of his
garments, weighed and measured and sifted. He has been dis-
sected, reconstructed, buried, dug up, shown up, and even cut up.
In short, we know something about him. There is no canonized
saint whose mind is not laid open before us. No case history of a
psychological patient exists which tells more about his conscious
and his subconscious mind, his motives, his drives and impulses,
his words and his reservations, his fantasies and dreams, his
thoughts, his actions and his will. And there is certainly no “case
history” so free from guesswork, so little coloured by any one

184 GUILT

theory, so honestly factual and realistic, and so amply confirmed
by the test of time.

Consequently, while there are many secret files hiding the dark
stories of disintegrity, which are seen only by a few specialists,
there are thousands of detailed stories to be read of human integrity
and of how it has been attained.

The most striking thing—and it is one of the very few things
that people so diverse as the saints have in common—is the will-
ingness to suffer. This might truly be called the basic quality of
human integrity.

By a curious paradox, the willingness to suffer is the key to
natural happiness and balance in a world of universal suffering
and neurosis. The willingness to suffer is not the explanation of
sanctity, but it is the explanation of the sanity of the saints. Be-
cause of it, that which contracts the selfish man’s heart expands
the heart of the saint. That which enslaves the selfish man sets
the saint free, that which humiliates the selfish man dignifies the
saint, that which embitters the selfish man sweetens the saint,
that which hardens the selfish man is the source of the saint’s
gentleness. That which drives the selfish man in onto himself in
lonely isolation is the saint’s communion with all other men.

Nevertheless, the saint is not only a stumbling-block to vain
and egocentric people, but to many sensitive, intelligent and un-
selfish people who, inspired by a generous love of humanity, see
in suffering not the results of evil, but evil itself. These are
compassionate people, who have been wounded by the agony of
the world, and nauseated by the cruelty with which men inflict
wanton, apparently useless suffering on one another. Every fibre
in their being calls out for happiness for mankind here and now,
and every instinct that they possess repudiates suffering and
shrinks from the sanctity that seems to be a willing magnet to it.

To these people the saint's attitude to suffering, and indeed to
life generally, seems neurotic, morbid, and unhealthy, sometimes
even vicious. Among the more aesthetic of these critics the word
“masochism” is used freely, and usually wrongly; they mean, when
they say that a saint is a “masochist,” that he enjoys suffering for
its own sake. This word masochism is used very loosely nowadays;

pier

fe,

ACCEPTANCE 185

like so many words that are passed to and fro in discussions of

psychology, it has lost its original meaning and gained others. -

Masochism really means deriving sexual satisfaction from having
pain inflicted upon one.

The followers of Freud who maintain that all human experience
is derived from sex, whether through the repression or expression
of sex, would maintain that even when it is not apparent, the
enjoyment of mental pain, which some people do experience, is
in the true sense masochism, because the mental state is sexual
too; others have come to use the word as simply meaning to enjoy
suffering for suffering’s sake, or for no earthly reason at all! Even
those people who are really moral masochists do not enjoy suffer-
ing for its own sake, but in common with all other neurotics they
choose (often unconsciously) among various sufferings, that one
which may protect them from another which would be more intol-
erable.

This process was well and crudely illustrated by the conscious,
deliberate choice of a schoolboy friend who, in order to avoid the
boredom of spending Christmas with an oversevere guardian
whom he disliked, gave himself a stomach ache, severe enough
to prevent his travelling to the guardian’s house, by taking a
tremendous number of pills. I have known other boys who require
no stimulant but their own wish, to develop fever on the day of
return to boarding school. And I know at first hand from the
doctor concerned, the amazing story of a patient of his (an in-
significant, lonely little woman, in whom no one seemed in-
terested) who, fearing when she was restored to health to lose
even his professional interest, filed great raw patches on her own
flesh with a wood rasp, preferring the pain of this to the feeling
of being nothing to anyone.

It is characteristic of the saint’s willingness to suffer, that it
includes no choice, he does not choose what he will suffer, or take
one suffering to avoid another, or as an indirect means to pleasure.
On the contrary, in his attitude in this, as in all else, is a
tremendous surrender of self. He does not choose suffering at all,
but he accepts it without conditions, because he surrenders him-
self to life and his personal destiny and makes no conditions.

186 GUILT

The sanity of the saint begins in that tremendous Fiat: “Let it
be unto me according to thy word”; while the insanity of selfish-
ness begins in another Fiat: “Let it be unto me according to my
vanity.”

It is—one cannot repeat too often—possible for a neurotic to
be a saint, and possible that a neurosis or a mental illness, as much
as any other illness, may be the means by which someone may
sanctify himself. On the other hand, sanctity and neurosis are not
the same thing. No one ever became a saint because he was
neurotic, though anyone could become a saint through the truly
heroic means of sanctifying his neurosis. The difficulty here, which
puzzles the outside observer, is that whilst sanctity and neurosis
in themselves are two different things, the outward symptoms of
both are often alike. ;

Nevertheless it is not surprising that many people confuse
sanctity with neurosis, for superficially, and even to a certain ex-
tent on deeper levels, saints and neurotics have much in common,
much that makes it difficult to distinguish one from the other with
certainty. There is a reason for this that goes deeper than the
obvious one, which is that in spite of the fact that every individual
is uniquely himself, there are certain basic factors which all
human beings have in common simply because they are human
beings; but this deeper reason will be explained in a later chapter,

To begin with the most superficial thing of all, and yet an
exterior thing which expresses what is hidden in a man: appear-
ance and dress. There are saints in every grade of society, from
kings and courtiers to beggars and monks, and therefore saints
who are dressed in scarlet or in rags, or even in black coats and
tweeds. But it is the ragged sanctity which stands: out in the
imagination of those who know the saints only from a distance,
and therefore know only those who are outwardly most con-
spicuous.

Now put Benedict Joseph Labre, who is a saint, by the side
of Arthur Rimbaud, who is a degenerate; they are both in rags,
they are both unwashed, it might be very difficult to know at a
glance which was the saint and which the sinner. More so because

ACCEPTANCE 187

both are consciously in revolt against society, and choose their
rags.

Or compare the depressing description of St. Gemma Galgani,
in her dowdy black dress and hat, which made her a joke to the
Italian street urchins, with one of those morbidly shy women who
dress in just such a way because they secretly dare not put their
charm to the test.

We cannot spot our saint by his clothes, but neither is it always
easy to know him by his way of thought, or by what he does or
says. There are many things commonly done both by neurotics
and saints, things which we would regard as hysteria, or even
vice, and certainly would be unwilling to tolerate in members of
our own family, and in this we should seldom differ from the
saints’ own relations in their time. There is, for example, flagella-
tion, self-starvation, vagabondage. It is true that the average
hagiographer would give different names to these peculiarities,
but those are the terms that might well be used if it were not
presupposed that we were speaking of saints.

It is not always easy to distinguish between the ways of thought
of saints and lunatics. I have myself been given a most edifying
explanation by a lunatic of how his life was modelled on that of
St. Teresa of Lisieux. In “offering up” (he told me) every detail
in life for the glory of God, he sanctified every “indifferent” action.
Thus he had on three separate occasions been able to make even
so simple and indifferent an act as the swinging of a club holy
(on three occasions he had swung it down on old ladies’ heads).

Perhaps most bewildering of all are the saints’ own words con-
cerning guilt, sin and their willingness to suffer. Not only is their
way of expressing themselves often repellent to those who hear
them, but it is not always easy to believe that their words can even
be sincere, unless we are allowed to think that the saint who
utters them is unbalanced.

After years of self-conquest in the religious life, St. Teresa of
Avila asserts: “I realize how numerous are my imperfections and
how unprofitable and how dreadfully wicked I am.” And again:
“I am sure that nowhere in the world has there ever been a worse
person than myself.”

188 GUILT

And listen to St. Catherine of Siena, to whose unflinching intel-
lect, self-knowledge seemed to be the beginning of all super-
natural love: “And with a great knowledge of herself, being
ashamed of her own imperfection; appearing to herself to be the
cause of all the evil that was happening throughout the world,
conceiving a hatred and displeasure against herself, and a feeling
of holy justice, with which knowledge, hatred and justice, she
purified the stains which seemed to her to cover her guilty soul,
she said: ‘O Eternal Father, I accuse myself before Thee, in order
that Thou mayest punish me for my sins in this finite life, and, in
as much as my sins are the cause of the sufferings which my neigh-
bour must endure, I implore Thee, in Thy kindness, to punish
them in my person.’ ”*

But we know that the young woman who is speaking is in-
nocent. She is not a converted sinner, she has been a saint since
she was a tiny child, there is no flaw in the crystal purity of her
mind, she is known to the people of her little city, who are in-
timate with her and who idolize her, as “The Lily of Siena.”

We have already considered the ego-neurotic who declares in
almost identical words that she is “the greatest sinner in the
world.” Why should these words be symptomatic of something
totally different when they are spoken by a saint? Above all, by
a blameless saint! Why, if they spring from colossal vanity and
self-love in the case of the egoist, should we suppose that they
spring from humility and the love of God in the case of the
saints?

It has already been suggested that the sufferings which ego-
neurotics bring upon themselves by deliberate but unconscious
choice are not accepted as those of the saints are by their will-
ingness to suffer, but by the desire to escape from some other,
and to them intolerable suffering, against which they offer a
defence. But why does not the same thing apply to the saints?

It must be repeated, the saint’s willingness to suffer can be
distinguished from the egoist’s disguised will not to suffer, by the
different effects of suffering itself on the two kinds of people, on
their personalities, and on their lives.

° A Treatise of Divine Providence.

ACCEPTANCE 189

The three commonest results of the will not to suffer are these:
it produces an unbalanced, sometimes even a disintegrated per-
sonality: it impoverishes life by limiting and narrowing experi-
ence; and it paralyzes the capacity for love.

On the other hand, the saints’ willingness to suffer results in
an integrated, balanced personality; it is the doorway to a limitless
variety and magnitude of experience; it liberates the capacity for
love.

Sanctity is the only cure for the vast unhappiness of our
universal failure as human beings.

Chapter Xm. THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE

“Thy friend put in thy bosom: wear his eyes

Still in thy heart, that he may see what's there.

If cause require, thou art his sacrifice;

Thy drops of blood must pay down all his fear:

But love is lost, the way of friendship’s gone,

Though David had his Jonathan, Christ his John.”—-From GEORGE
-HERBERT, “The Church Porch”

THE ONE ESSENTIAL for sanctity is the capacity to love. Certainly
this means, first of all, the capacity to love God. But because it
is impossible to love God without loving man simultaneously, it
necessarily includes the capacity to love other people.

Sanctity is a genius for love. This is why the saint never com-
plains of not being “fulfilled.” No matter what the circumstances
of his life are, the saint loves to his fullest human capacity, not
only supernaturally, though this is what matters, but naturally,
too; and it is on the degree of his capacity for objective love,
and on nothing else, that the fullness of any man’s life depends.

It does not depend upon circumstances or chance, on whether
he is gifted or not, on whether he has a happy or a melancholy
temperament, on whether he is rich or poor, married or single,
on whether he has a magnificent vocation or a humdrum one, on
whether he travels the world over or is restricted to the same few
streets for the whole of his life, on whether he is good-looking
or plain, on whether he is healthy or unhealthy; it depends upon
one thing and one thing only—whether he has or has not got the
capacity to love.

The one thing which all the saints have in common is the
capacity to love. There are many people who think that they have

140

THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE 141

almost every other characteristic but this in common, that they
are all turned out, as it were, in one mould, and that a very
inhuman one. They believe that the saints are not subject to the
ordinary weakness of human nature but are free from the tempta-
tions and difficulties of temperament which assail other people.
Further, they think that they are not obliged to struggle for
their immunity but are born as saints, just as small children
sometimes imagine that nuns are born as nuns, complete with
religious habit, rosary and boots.

The saints are and have always been people of every imaginable
type and character, born with every possible heredity and tem-
perament into every possible environment and circumstance.
They have been people of every class and race and colour. They
have been legitimate and illegitimate children, they have been
born to riches and to poverty, to honour and contempt. They
have been ugly and beautiful, crippled and whole. They have
belonged ‘to every trade and profession, followed every imagin-
able vocation. They have been priests and monks and laymen,
contemplatives, labourers, poets, artists, kings and queens and
peasants, and servants. They have been doctors, soldiers, fisher-
men, tradesmen, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, celi-
bates, virgins and penitents.

Some have already been sanctified in childhood and kept their
integrity, others have been sanctified and died, complete human
beings, while they were still children, others have begun to be
saints in their youth, others only in their maturity. Some have
become saints slowly and after years of perseverance, others
have become saints suddenly and after living dissolute and sinful
lives; one at least became a saint only in the last moment of his
life, the thief upon the Cross.

There is no type, no pattern, which predisposes to sanctity.
Spiritually minded children are not more likely to become saints
than wilful and mischievous ones. Simple, uncomplicated people
are neither more nor less probable than introverted and complex
people, Piety is as full of pitfalls as impiety.

The saints have exactly the same problems as everyone else.
They have to overcome temptations, to control passions, to accept

142 : GUILT

themselves. Their family relationships are as difficult as our own;
there is no special privilege given to the saints, when they are
striving towards sanctity, which either saves them from the
results of clashing temperaments or, on the other hand, saves
their long-suffering families from being bewildered and some-
times exasperated by their ways.

The only thing that distinguishes a saint from other people on
earth is his capacity for love.

The personal, natural loves of the saints are the illuminated
pages of history; the friendships of the saints are the epic friend-
ships of the world. It would be a heavenly task to write a book
that was only an anthology of the human loves and friendships of
the saints, but that would have to be a far bigger book than this
one, and here I can only speak briefly of a few of them.

Very close to most ordinary people is St. Thomas More, because
his home was a home built upon genuine family love. His second
wife did not understand the brilliance of her husband's sanctity
or of his mind, and tended to nag, but his affection and humour
even overcame that, and his was a household of joyful children,
of wit and laughter and happy learning. But between him and
his daughter, Margaret Roper, there was a yet deeper love, the
natural blossomed into the supernatural; she was the one human
being who encouraged him in his long imprisonment, and who
suffered most and yet rejoiced in his martyrdom.

The love between St. Monica and St. Augustine, who were
mother and son, is known to everyone, but not everyone knows
of his deep love, as distinct from the sinful lust which he also had,
for his mistress with whom he lived for many years faithfully and
who was the mother of his son. Augustine was a passionate and a
sensual man to whom, until he received extraordinary grace to
overcome his lust, a woman was an absolute necessity. But she
was not simply “a woman” to him as a mistress often is to men
of his type. The pain manifest in his own description of their
separation, brought about (bafilingly, to me) by St. Monica, who
planned a marriage for her son, tells its own story of genuine love,
accompanying but transcending the passion which enslaved him.

“Meanwhile my sins were multiplied. She with whom I had

Courtesy of Pantheon Books

BENEDICT JosEPH LABRE

Neon

THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE 148

lived so long was torn from my side as a hindrance to my forth-
coming marriage. My heart which held her very dear was broken
and wounded and shed blood. She went back to Africa, swearing
that she would never know another man, and left with me the
natural son I had had of her. But I in my unhappiness could not,
for all my manhood, imitate her resolve. I was unable to bear the
delay of two years which must pass before I was to get the girl
I had asked for in marriage. In fact it was not really marriage.
that I wanted—I was simply a slave to lust. So I took another
woman, not of course as a wife; and thus my soul’s disease was
nourished and kept alive as vigorously as ever, indeed worse than
ever, that it might reach the realm of matrimony in the company
of its ancient habit. Nor was the wound healed that had been
made by the cutting off of my former mistress. For there was first
burning and bitter grief; and after that it festered, and as the pain
grew duller it only grew more hopeless.”®

As for his son, he is remembered over all these hundreds of
years, though he died still a boy and had achieved nothing. But
he is remembered as a uniquely lyrical personality, very brilliant
and pure and shining, the impression given by his father in words
that are lit up by love.

Lyrical too the romance, for romance it was, of the marriage
of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and her crusader, Louis, whom she
would kiss on the mouth before all the crowds when he came
home from the crusades.

Surely St. Catherine of Siena was the most effective woman in
history, yet it is not for that that she is so cherished in the minds
of thousands of people today, but because of her friendships,
romantic friendships on their side, with courtiers and poets and
soldiers, and her deep affection for her devoted women friends.

St. Teresa of Avila smiles warmly across the centuries in her
delight in her little pocket-man, St. John of the Cross, while the
love between St. Clare and St. Francis of Assisi is both the most
intensely realistic love that there has ever been between a man
and a woman, and sheer poetry. It could be a story told by Hans
Andersen, for it is told in the shining of snow, in miraculous roses

* The Confessions of St. Augustine; trans. by F. J. Sheed, p. 119.

144 GUILT

breaking upon the snow-covered trees, that Francis might gather
them for Clare in midwinter, and told in water and moonlight,
when God granted Francis the vision of Clare’s lovely face, that
the saint pined to look upon, shining up to him from a well of
moonlit water.

We could go on for ever, the saints and their mothers, the
saints and their husbands, the saints and their friends. But the
saints’ capacity for love, while never growing tepid in its natural
expressions, reaches out beyond them, perhaps radiates from
them, and we find them loving the unlovable and the repulsive.

The same man who loved the Lady Clare and gathered her
roses of snow, who was a troubadour and fastidious, took a leper
into his arms and kissed him. And that is typical of all the others.
_Wherever human misery is, the love of the saints finds it. St.
Vincent de Paul was driven by love to fight the rats on the dust
heaps of Paris to rescue and save the illegitimate babies flung
there by their mothers; St. John Bosco gathered the delinquents
around him and gave them his home—we can go on for ever in
this strain.

From the love of the saints all the mercy and healing in the
temporal world has sprung—hospitals, orphanages, shelter for old
people, help for the wounded in battle. From their love all mercy
has come, and from it too the spiritual healing of mankind. It is
the saints who find and enlighten the ignorant, who teach the poor
and the ragged children as well as clothing them, who go out from
their own homes to find and teach the heathens and savages and to
save them from the satanic cruelty that is mixed with their reli-
gious practices. It is the saints who penetrate secretly into Soviet
countries, and for the sake of shriving an old peasant or cate-
chising.a little child, die gladly.

We may well ask what, in a practical sense, gives the saints
this unlimited capacity for love, this capacity for love which is
uniquely theirs in that it does not exclude any one at all. For the
saints love sinners as much as they love saints, they love both
the rich and the poor, and their friends and their enemies.

There is one exclusion from their love, which explains some- _

thing of their huge gift, namely self. In a saint there is no self-

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THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE 145

love as that word is ordinarily used. It is self-love which has given
a false ring to the beautiful word charity, a false sound and a
false meaning for modern ears, for the characteristics of self-love
are its sharp limits and its strong instinct for self-protection.

The lover of self does indeed appear to love those who love him,
and those who he would say belong to him; he loves those who
help him to keep his self-esteem, who give him a sense of security
or who minister in some way to his pleasure, but every one of
these affections is subjective. He sees no one, knows no one, as a
distinct human being, separate from himself, with his own life to
live, his own work to do, his own soul to make, his secret self. No,
everyone is known to the self-lover only in relation to himself, only
through his relationship to self: “My husband (or wife), my child,
my mother, my friend”—and so on.

The self-lover further limits the radiation of his love by self-
protection. It is impossible to love self and not live in fear; every-
thing is a'threat to self—disease, poverty, death. Even in those
subjective loves that he admits, there lurks the threat of suffering
or loss; he may be bereaved, demands may be made on him of
a nature that will threaten his own well-being. He may be asked

- to give, he may be asked to serve, he may be asked to forgive;
he may be asked for sympathy.

All those things may deprive himself or bring him suffering
which he need not have had. If he gives too much, he may find he
is in want of something. Service may tire him or, if it is to the
sick, contaminate him; forgiveness may force him to see some-
thing through the eyes of another and disturb his complacency;
and sympathy is the worst of all, as this means sharing in
another's sorrow, a real self-giving. Anything else can be given
without involving self, but sympathy is giving self to suffer some-
one else’s suffering.

The person who really loves self exclusively almost invariably
suffers from an unresolved guilt conflict, guilt which he has never
faced squarely, never admitted to himself, done nothing at all to
expiate; and consequently guilt seeps into all his emotions and
poisons them. Even those subjective loves that he allows him-
self are likely to prove distressing both to himself and the sub-

146 GUILT

jects, because the threat of suffering or the demand they make
will bring an element of dislike into them. The mere fact that his
happiness has become, to some extent, dependent on another,
who may bring suffering to him through something beyond the
control of either (such as death), or who makes him feel that
since he is no longer heartfree he has lost something of his
emotional independence, can turn his affection to resentment and °
dislike. |

The complete lover of self will in extreme cases develop hatred
for anyone to whom he has a natural obligation, such as
parents, husband or wife, or even his own childgen, and because
such hatred makes him feel guilty he will abandon them, or
neglect them in order not to be reminded by their presence of the
duty which, because it makes a demand on him and limits his
freedom, he repudiates and detests.

Fear above all will be aggravated by self-love, so that the very
existence of suffering, illness and poverty, will become hateful
to him, not because it is the outward showing of universal guilt,
not because he has compassion for others, but because it is a
personal threat and a depressing reminder of the things he wishes
to forget, particularly his own responsibility to a race whose
common guilt he shares.

For these reasons, this word charity rings so false, and self-
lovers at the same time are often said to be very charitable,
because they are only too willing to give, from a distance, to insti-
tutions, in order to do what they can to have sickness and misery
of all kinds kept under control, kept out of sight, and as far as
possible decontaminated. Their unexamined motive is not to heal
suffering, but to disinfect it.

Now in contrasting the attitude of the saint, something can be
discovered about his capacity for love. The saint’s love is
objective, he does see others as themselves, and he sees them as
equally important as himself, or more so. But he too has a certain
kind of subjectivity in his love for them, for he sees one thing
about them which he realizes as part of himself. He sees his own
guilt as a contributory cause of the suffering of the race, and so
cannot see any man’s suffering as no affair of his. This is one rea-

THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE 147.

son why he cannot see suffering and not be driven to help to
alleviate it, why he must give to the poor without counting what
he gives, and must tend the sick with his own hands, and why
he cannot see pain or grief on the face of a little child and not
make that little child his own, for whom his own interests, and
if needs be his own life, must be given up. He has in himself
.Christ’s heart to love with, he loves with his love, it is Christ in
him who loves.

But also it is Christ that he loves in them. Man’s soul is created
by God in his own image and likeness. But within the Godhead,
the Son is the image and likeness of the Father, so that man’s
soul is created by God in the pattern of his Son. Not only that,
God the Son became man, not merely a human soul, but wholly
man. Because he is the perfection of manhood, the manhood of
all men can but be modelled upon his, so that his image is woven
into our very being as men. Our destiny is to preserve that image
and to develop it into the closest possible resemblance to Christ.
In that sense, Christhood is man’s destiny. We may by sin distort
the image, but not out of all recognition. God, looking at the
worst of men, can see in them what image it is that they have
distorted. So can the saints. Saints cannot see men primarily as
sinners; in sinful men they see Christ on the cross. And they
cannot see men as derelicts, useless, having no worth if they do
not and cannot give something to the state or community; they
can only see them as Christ, down on his face in the dust under
the weight of the cross, needing another man to help him carry it.

“I was thirsty and you gave me not to drink. . .” When we
refuse drink to the thirsty, we are not consciously refusing it to
Christ; we do not see Christ in them. The saint does. The saint’s
love is a cradle and warmth for the infant Christ in every needy
infant, haven and peace for the child Christ in flight in the refugee
children, the orphaned and lost. It is food and drink for the
hunger and thirst of Christ in the destitute; a cloak for the naked
Christ in the shamed and exposed; silence for Christ derided and
mocked in the persecuted; myrrh poured over the dead Christ
in the reprobate and the lost.

It is the vision of Christ in man that enables the saint to do

148 GUILT

what the lover of self can never do—devote himself to those whose
suffering he cannot relieve. Even. love in these materialist days
is utility for the self-lover. If he can derive the immense satis-
faction of seeing results, it repays him for his efforts, and he will
go on, but where there are no results, he soon finds he cannot go
on, for he has nothing to give. For those whose suffering is incur-
able, the only thing anyone can give is compassion—the self-
giving which is entering into communion with another by sharing
his passion.

This applies to so many forms of suffering in the world today—
there are so many survivors of the worst horrors of our wars who
cannot be comforted, and so many sick who cannot be cured, so
many unstable who cannot be changed—and most of all, so many
whose suffering is in their mind, and so cannot often be even
alleviated. In all these the saint sees Christ. He sees Christ in
Gethsemane, the Christ who asked in vain, not for his friends to
take his suffering from him (that they could not do), but that
they would watch with him, simply be there with him and give
him themselves in compassion.

The fact that the saints do relieve such suffering as can be
relieved, that they clothe and nurse and feed and illuminate and
shelter, is incidental; it is the overflowing of love, and its inclu-
siveness and dauntless quality is that they go to suffering people
because in these people they see Christ and must be with him.
When they cannot relieve a man’s suffering they must suffer it
with him. That is illogical, it is foolish, it is improvident, it is
fanatical—precisely—but that is love.

Knowing the weakness of human nature, it seems surprising
that even the saints are able to sustain such love for the suffering
Christ, and to pursue him in his suffering and dwell on it so con-
tinually; and this all the more so in view of the fact that his
suffering in men is, after all, a continual reproach to them, and
that reproach felt, one presumes, as acutely as their sorrow for
sin—which, as we know, far surpasses that of other people.

For the saint realizes, with the sharp realization of the lover,
that it is sin that crucified Christ, and that all this suffering

THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE 149

that continues in the members of Christ is the crucifixion going
on in man. He cannot live in the world without seeing the crucifix
wherever he looks, and he cannot see the crucifix, the living man,
and not be pierced with the thought that it is he who crucified
Christ.

This is why in contrast to the lover of self, who seeks only the
company of those who help him to forget his debt to mankind
for his own sins—the prosperous, the outwardly attractive, the
healthy—the saint is constrained to seek those who are disfigured
by the suffering that guilt has brought into the world and who
bleed with Christ’s wounds. It is the comfort of the saints to com-
fort Christ in man. It is precisely because of the character of a
saint's sorrow for sin that his love for the suffering Christ is
strong and lasting.

As we have seen again and again, subjective sorrow for sin,
the sorrow of self-love, turns a man’s eyes away from God, but the
saint loves God objectively, with Christ’s love, and his sorrow
is not because of a wound inflicted on himself, but because of a
wound inflicted on Christ. He does not turn in to himself to apply
healing balm, but he turns to Christ and pours out his sorrow on
his wounds. And instead of being dragged down and devitalized
by the aching misery of his own sin-consciousness, the saint is
lifted up into self-forgetting by the knowledge of Christ’s joy in
receiving his sorrow and the saving of his soul, as his own crown.

This love and joy of Christ on the cross it is that Blessed Julian
of Norwich had seen in a vision, when she said “This that I say is
so great bliss to Jesu, that he setteth at naught his travail, and his
passion, and his cruel and shameful death. And in these words
‘If I might suffer more I would suffer more’ I saw truly that as
often as he might die, so often he would, and love should never
let him have rest till he had done it. ... He said not if it were need-
ful to suffer more; but ‘If I might suffer more. For though it were
not needful and he might suffer more, he would. This deed and
this work about our salvation, was ordained as well as God might
ordain it; it was done as worshipfully as Christ might do it; and
herein I saw a full bliss in Christ; for his bliss should not have

150 GUILT

been full, if it might any better have been done than it was
done.”*®

It is this joy of Christ’s love, his endless bliss in his passion for
love, that enlivens the saint and expands his own heart with great
increase of love for him, and enables him to love him in suffering
men, insatiably and even- joyfully. Such love is without end, and
is an ever increasing desire; the saint does not ask to be satisfied,
he knows that love is illimitable desire, and says, not in sadness,
but in the bliss of divine love, with Christ, “If I might suffer more
I would suffer more.”

a Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Kegan
Paul).

PART THREE

Integrity

gee tee eared

Chapter X1v. CHILD, MAN, SOUL

“It was not you that chose me, it was I that chose you” (John 15.16)

MopvERN MAN is obsessed by himself, and the obsession is an
unhappy one, for it is really an obsession with his personal failure
as a human being. He is acutely aware of his want of integrity.
He longs to realize himself as a complete human being, but he
does not know how to achieve this. Not unnaturally he is
bewildered by the multiplicity of theories that are continually
increasing about him—theories which contradict each other, and
which impress him chiefly by their obscurity.

Psychiatrists, particularly amateur psychiatrists, have started
to build a tower of Babel, and again the would-be builders are
divided and frustrated by the confusion of tongues. The psycho-
logical jargon that has become part of colloquial speech has
taken on so many different meanings, that for the majority, it no
longer means anything at all. The ordinary man has ceased to
know what he is, or why he is. He has even ceased to know what
man is; he may be a kind of monkey or he may be a kind of god,
or he may be merely a wild confusion of tortured psychological
processes.

He thinks that his bewilderment is caused by lack of knowl-
edge about himself, but here man is wrong; the real source of
his bewilderment is lack of knowledge about God.

It is true that in order to achieve an integrated personality
man must have some true knowledge of himself, but he cannot
get this knowledge by introspection, or self-analysis. Indeed the
more an individual concentrates on himself, gazes into himself, the
less does he know himself as he is. The only way in which any

153

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man can learn to know himself sufficiently to begin to achieve
integrity is through coming to know God. It is only through his
response to God that a man can begin to know what he is and why
he is, and how to become whole, and only when he has become
whole can any man fulfill his destiny as a human being.

Man is God’s image. He is made in the likeness of God. There
are three persons in God, and if it would be fanciful to say
that there are three persons in man, at least man may profitably
be considered under three aspects. They are the child, the man,
the soul. As I say, I do not mean that there are three distinct
persons in man, but I do mean something more than a woman
does when she says of a man that he is a “child at heart.”

A child in years is of course a complete human being; he has
his soul, the same soul that he will have as a man, if he grows
to manhood. He is able to fulfill his human destiny of Christhood
as a child, as child saints have done. It is a mistake to think of a
child only as a potential adult, as many people do. This is an
attitude which, if the child becomes conscious of it, may even
frustrate the full flowering of real childhood, which must develop
if his childhood is to attain its own perfection.

If he grows to manhood, the child that will persist in him is
likely to keep the characteristics of his actual childhood. If he
was never, spiritually, a child at all, he will have a hard way to
get back to that real state that is essential for possession of the
Kingdom of Heaven.

By saying there are these three elements in man, I mean that he
remains the child of God when he is a man, and he has the
character, the instincts and the needs of a child all through his
life. He has, at the same time, the character and maturity and
powers of a grown man, the potential or actual lover, husband,
worker and father. And he has an immortal soul, with its own
imperious needs.

The harmony of these three is the secret of man’s integrity.
Each of them must come to its own fullness of being; the child to
the full flower of childhood; the man to the maturity of manhood;
the soul must radiate the Spirit of God.

The child in man exists because there is a father in God,

CHILD, MAN, SOUL 155

because God is a father. Man’s childhood is the answer to God’s
fatherhood, it is the father’s love in God that is the cause of
the child’s being in man. The child in man grows to the loveliness
of complete childhood, just in so far as it responds to the father
in God.

The man—that is, the adult—in every human being becomes
mature only in the measure in which he lives in God the Son, and.
because God the Son became man, and is the very incarnation
of love, the mature man is essentially a lover; man’s maturity
is love.

Neither the child in man nor the lover could live, as they do
live, with God's life, were it not that the Holy Spirit, who is, in
himself, the sign of unutterable love between the Father and the
Son, breathes life into the dust to be the soul of man; only in the
response of man’s soul to the Holy Spirit in God can his childhood
flower, his manhood bear fruit, his soul illuminate his personality.

Not one of the three elements in man is there by chance; they
are dependent upon each other, and as we have said, on their
harmony with one another man’s integrity depends. The reason
for this is perfectly simple; the oneness of these three restores
man to his likeness to God, and that and that alone is man’s
wholeness.

The neglect of one of the three persons in man, or the repression
or inhibiting of one of them, or the overdevelopment of one at the
expense of the others, is the most usual cause of the unbalanced,
lopsided personality which is the characteristic of our generation,
as it must necessarily be of any generation that does not know
God.

Equally certain is it that a generation that turns away from
God will be a discouraged generation, and that we most certainly
are. It is because modern man.has an essentially discouraged
personality that he tends to turn away from the idea of God, and
to seek refuge from the effort involved in restoring the divine
image in himself by accepting, and even wallowing in, the squalor
of his own unhappiness.

Discouraged as man is, he accepts his sense of human failure,
because he believes that any effort to restore God’s image in him-

156 GUILT

self would inevitably lead to greater failure and greater humilia-
tion. This is one of the legion of evils resulting from seeking
self-knowledge by introspection—in looking at self, instead of
looking away from self to God, trying to know self not only
through self-analysis but even through the most distorting mirror
there is, self-pity, instead of trying to know self through knowing
God.

An infant knows its littleness through the largeness of its
mother’s lap, its dependence through the strong circle of its
mother’s arms. The fulfillment of its needs teaches it what it
needs, its insecurity becomes its confidence.

In what we lack we come to know God’s love.

When I say that in order to know ourselves we must know
God, I do not, of course, mean that we could ever know God
wholly through our intellect. We can know a little, a very little
indeed, about God through it, but that is all. Heaven forbid that
in saying this I should be thought to mean that we ought not to
use our intellect to find God—too many people do think that, they
even seem to think that we should not use our intellect at all upon
God. The opposite is true; we ought to train and instruct our
mind and consecrate it to God, but this is not the essential means
to psychological integrity. That is come to not only by thought,
but by living in God consciously.

The Blessed Trinity is illimitable mystery, but just because we
are made in the image of the Trinity, we can know God a little
through love, not our love for him, but his love for us. Through
all that we lack; we can know something of what God gives,
through all that we are not we can know something of what God
is, and the most and surest that we can know about ourselves is
that we are that which God wills, we are that which God loves.
It is in this knowledge that there exists just that kernel of
reassurance that is so desperately needed by the hesitating and
faltering human beings that we are.

It is not by an impersonal study of theology that we come to this
kind of knowledge of God, but by responding to his will to love
us, by not resisting his love.

CHILD, MAN, SOUL 157

Although God lacks nothing and cannot need us, it is his will
and his choice to want us, to want us to be the answer to his love.
He who needs nothing, wills to have us to be the objects of his
love, the creation of his love. God created us to want us, God
created us to love us. |

Once we realize this, it must become obvious that we have no
need to be ashamed of our feeling of personal insufficiency, or to
be surprised by the pattern of our neurosis, with its apparently —
insane egoism and unreasonable demands, or of our torturing
sense of helplessness and nothingness, or of our seemingly in-
ordinate and insatiable longing to be loved. Naturally, when these
demands are directéd to other human creatures instead of to God
they cannot be met, and must become grotesque and ludicrous,
but in themselves they are right and reasonable.

Man is constantly haunted by the fear that if he is not loved,
he will cease to be; this is not a delusion, it is the truth. If he
were not loved, he would cease to be; he exists only because God
wills him to be, and keeps him in being, that he may be the object
of his own creative love.

We should rejoice in our lack, in our nothingness, and in our
excessive desire to be loved, because it is God’s delight to love us,
and to love us immeasurably and with the illimitable tenderness
that our violent littleness craves.

The child in us exists and feels the clamorous needs of a little
child, because it is God’s nature to create, to make new, to sustain,
to feed and to clothe, to see himself and to love himself in a little
one. For his own delight he creates this child in us. He wants to
clothe and to feed, and moreover to clothe his children extrava-
gantly, to dress them more beautifully than he dresses the wild
flowers: to feed them on living bread, grown from the seed that
has been buried and has received the light of the sun in darkness,
that has been gathered and bound in the splendour of the ripe
ear of wheat, and threshed and purified in the fire; to feed them
on his own life. God did not create woman, whose joy it is to feed
her child at her breast, by chance; she is the expression of his own
love that wills to féed his little children on himself.

158 GUILT

It is not a matter for shame or fear to the mature man that he
cannot contain the sweetness of his own life, that rises in him like
the sap in the trees; that he is aware of the spring and the summer
within himself, of the very shape of the bud and the leaf pushing
towards the light. He must give life, and the glory of life is within
him to give, only because God is the giver of life, and Christ the
Son of Man, whose image he is, came to give life abundantly on
the earth. Man is a lover because God wills to give life through
man, and love is the giving of life.

Most mysterious of all is man’s soul; it is not man who first
desires all that he has through the possession of his own soul—
that his life shall be a thing of beauty, that from it Heaven shall
be radiated on earth, that his love shall be creative, that he shall
" have the faculty to know God and the possession of immortality.
None of this or the desire of it starts in man; it is again simply that
which God wants. The Infinite Spirit of Divine Love desires to
descend into the dust, to breathe life into it, the life of God;
desires to abide in man and to be his life, so that God may look
upon himself eternally in this creature of dust whom he has made
out of psthing to be the object of his utter love.

“€ you will think back to the first section of this book where
we paused with man in his saddest condition, grotesque with sin,
isolated by his own egoism, sometimes alone in society, sometimes
in prisons and lunatic asylums, sometimes on the scaffold, and
often trying to escape from God by making a god of himself, you
will see now why I said in every man, even the derelict, the
outcast who has cast himself out, there is a Homing Toad.

So absolutely essential to man’s very being is the pattern in
which God has made him, that when he has distorted that pattern
by sin, even his abnormality, his neurosis and his madness struggle
to get back to it; what appears as the most terrible contortion is
the writhing and twisting of this misshapen thing trying to get
back into its proper shape. Deny it as he will, frustrate it as far as
he and Satan together can, there is deep down in man a craving to
be that which God wants him to be.

CHILD, MAN, SOUL 159

When a man fastens this craving onto some other being, either
because he does not know God, or because he does not know that
only God, who created his need, can fill it, the result is neurosis.
It must be remembered here, that many self-consciously “spir-
itual” people do not know God, because their spirituality tends to
continual self-examination, which like all self-obsession blinds
one to God. I am speaking not of theoretical knowledge of God,
but of the direct knowledge which comes by living experience.

When a man fastens this craving onto himself, it results in
grotesque and horrible shapes, leading sometimes to crime and
sometimes to madness. In spite of these tragic facts, the nature of
man’s craving, which is stripped naked in neurosis and insanity,
points straight to the basic realities of human nature, and to the
secret of its healing.

What is it that the neurotic invariably demands? It is to be
loved inordinately, to be the absorbing and exclusive object of
someone’s love, to be loved unreasonably and in fact illimitably,
and for himself alone! Again, he asks to be treated like an ir-
responsible child, one to whom everything is given and from
whom nothing is asked in return. And the most striking and -fre-
quent characteristic of criminals and of lunatics? Surely, personal
aggrandizement.

It is only because his desires are not centred upon God that
they wreck a man, for what the neurotic asks is exactly what man
was created for; to be loved illimitably, to be loved not for any
particular quality or act of his own, but because God made him
only that he might love him with infinite, inexhaustible love. The
only meaning and purpose of his existence is to be loved. The
neurotic is broken, but he is broken on the rock of truth, for he
is in fact infinitely loved. If he were not, he would cease to be.

Again, man is, and is meant to be a child, to whom everything
is given, and that certainly without return, for man has nothing
and is nothing, excepting that which the Father gives him and
makes him.

As to aggrandizement, the poor lunatic who thinks that he is
God comes far closer to realizing what he is made for than the

160 GUILT

mediocre person who is resigned to snivel his way through life,
preferring to be a poor fellow rather than make the effort or take
the risk involved in being anything else!

Man was and is created to be like God. Satan, who sometimes
persuades criminal men that they are like God because of their
crimes, or through their own power, or who deludes the lunatic
into thinking that he is God by virtue of his own nature, has not
changed his technique of temptation in the least since he put
this idea into Eve’s mind in Eden, that by disobeying God, she
would make herself equal to him—“and the woman said unto the
serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but
of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God
hath said, ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it lest ye
die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely
- die. For God knoweth that in the day ye eat thereof, then your
eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil” (Gen. 3. 2-5).

Satan is, as he always was, subtle enough to work on a desire
which must be in man, and at first it is surprising that it should
have been a sin for Eve to want to be like God, since God made
her to be so.

The answer is this: when man thinks that he can make himself
like God, that it is in his power to make himself like God, he is
mad.

When a man tries to become like God by going against’s God’s
will, he is bad.

When he surrenders to God’s will, then he is like God, because
God wills him to be so.

But that is a great understatement; man is more than like God;
through his union with Christ he really does live in God’s life,
he is in fact one with God. The difference between the Son of
God and Christ in man is that Christ is the Son of God and is God
by his own nature, but man is lifted up into the life of God, to
share in it, by a free act of God’s love, which makes him one with
Christ. .

The pathos of the madman’s and the criminal’s passion for
aggrandizement can only be understood when we understand that

CHILD, MAN, SOUL 161

man’s true destiny is to be a Christ, and therefore that his glory
is not only not inconsistent with humility on earth, but is crowned
by it.

The beginning of integrity is not effort, but surrender; it is
simply the opening of the heart to receive that for which the heart
is longing. The healing of mankind begins whenever any man
ceases to resist the love of God.

Chapter Xv. THE CHILD IN MAN

“Like a child who has wandered into a forest

Playing with an imaginary playmate

And suddenly discovers he is only a child

Lost in a forest, wanting to go home.”—r. s. ELIOT, The Cocktail Party®

WE af all familiar with the child in man, the child who never
leaves the adult. We are quick to see it in others and to rebuke
it in them, and we are inclined to repudiate it in ourselves, to be
ashamed of it and to do what we can to keep it out of sight, and
not only out of other people’s sight but our own. We try to banish
the child in us from our consciousness, to send him away where
he will not be seen or heard, much as many parents of the
Victorian days banished their children to the nurseries of their
great sad houses.

There are, however, a minority of people who indulge the child
in them, at the expense both of their maturity and their soul, and
are determined that he or she shall be recognized and pandered
to by others. Who does not know one of those women who resort
to infantile behaviour and mouth out baby-prattle when trying to
extort money for their extravagances from their men? or those
who use their own babyish character to avoid the responsibilities
of womanhood and actually demand of their husbands, whom
they condemn to childless and comfortless marriages, that they
should treat them as helpless little children—and even play with
dolls and stuffed animals with them? But this woman has her
counterpart in the man in whom the child is so predominant, that

® (New York: Harcourt, Brace).
162

THE CHILD IN MAN 168

he is quite unable to fall in love and marry so long as his mother
lives. His whole emotional life is knotted up in his relationship
with her, and he is quite unable to face the adult responsibility of
supporting a family. He may, however, marry when his mother
dies, if he can find a woman content merely to take her place and
to have no child but her husband.

It is the child, who, of the three elements in man, is least under-
stood, who meets with the most inconsistent treatment, and not
unnaturally becomes troublesome; sometimes not merely trouble-
some but terrible. This poor child in man has almost universally
become a nasty child, and what is there on earth more nasty than
a nasty child?

The child in the adult, just like the child in years, is largely the
victim of circumstances. His character has usually been formed
when he really was, physically, a child. There are a great many
children in years, unhappily, whose essential qualities of child-
hood are twisted, or even destroyed, long before they grow to
manhood or even to adolescence, children who are not children.

The first step towards adult integrity is to restore the child in
man to the primal loveliness of essential childhood.

Perhaps the most decisive fact about the character of any in-
dividual child is his attitude to life and to other people. But in
most cases, his attitude to life and to other people has been largely
imposed on him, long before he was able to defend himself. _

Keeping in mind the fact that what the child becomes in the
nursery years is what he is likely to remain in the world (unless
he deliberately sets about restoring his own childhood), we can
learn much about the grown man from a study of the effects of
the various kinds of emotional education meted out to little
children. For it is certain that attitudes are caused mainly by
feeling, and hardly at all by thinking. By “attitude” I mean the
approach to other people and to life; it may be one of trust or
cynicism, affection or hostility, gentleness or aggression, confi-
dence or fear. There are three kinds of children resulting from
wrong emotional education: the humiliated child, the cynical
child, the negative child.

Obviously, from such a generalization there are countless varia-

164 : GUILT

tions—no two individuals are quite alike, and cut-and-dried defi-
nitions about human beings must always be faulty, but they will
serve to start a train of thought. Of course, there are many people
in whom attitudes to life are mixed, and are so partly because of
inherent differences in the individuals, partly because of con-
flicting elements in the education; for example, a spoiling mother
and a bullying father, or a doting father and a nagging mother—
or a mixed marriage, parents with different, perhaps opposite
convictions. We have only to think of any individual we know and
to ask ourselves which type of child abides in him, to discover
that in most cases we shall find that there are characteristics of
more than one of them. Since human nature and human circum-
stances are inexhaustibly involved and complicated, this coulg
be taken for granted.

Spoiling makes a child helpless. The child who is waited on
hand and foot, literally spoon-fed for too long, whose every wish
is granted without any effort being required on his part, and from
whom, moreover, even the idea of suffering is hidden in so far
as it can be, and the reality of evil and sin and their consequences
buried under a flowery mound of pretty, wishful thinking, is quite
obviously condemned to become helpless and incapable of loving.
He is dependent on other people, he is unable to make the efforts
of will necessary to become independent or to achieve happiness
for himself. Inevitably, he must grow into a humiliated human
being.

From wanting simple bodily necessities and pleasures, this
child will soon grow to want abstract necessities; he will want the
love of grown-up people, not because he appreciates what love
is, but because it is the only guarantee of his security; unless
someone is wholly concentrated on him, his needs and wishes
may not be seen and immediately gratified. For this reason he
will see all other people, children and adults, as dangers to him-
self, competitors for the love which is his surety. He will resort
to a number of transparent devices to keep his mother’s attention
strained upon him, and very soon he will discover that his strong
suit is to keep her in constant anxiety—what power this gives him!

THE CHILD IN MAN 165

He starts his tyranny by refusing to eat, he continues by refusing
to sleep. He is liable to have inexplicable screaming attacks, re-
sulting in something that looks very much like a fit, in which he
will become rigid. This not only adds to his mother’s certainty of
his delicacy and oversensitivity, but has the secondary desired
effect of driving away less vulnerable nurses or servants, unless
they too are spoilers.

He is adept, too, at causing grown-ups to quarrel, even his
father and mother, and will manage to break up any conversation
between them which is not about himself. Thus again and again
a little child will be as good as gold when alone with father or
mother or nurse, but a fiend incarnate when they are three

together.

I have known a boy of ten who was able to put his own knee
out of joint, and invariably did so, if his mother accompanied him
and his ‘adoring father for. their Sunday walk! and a much younger
child who choked, with great success, at every meal attended by
her really devoted stepfather!

As for tears—what a power they are, and who has not known
the grown woman who rules her perpetually distressed household
by the tyranny of tears! |

The spoilt child does not usually stop at tricks (and of course
these tricks very soon become unconsciously motivated, so
spontaneous that he no longer knows he is playing tricks); he
frequently goes on to aggression, and it is always, and necessarily,
the spoiler who is the victim of his hostility.

To understand why I say necessarily, it requires only to look at
the whole process of spoiling. The child is made helpless, he is
obsessed by fears of not being able to get what he needs, of being
unable to forgo, to restrain, or to satisfy a wish by his own efforts,
of not being loved to the exclusion of competitors, and of being
deeply if blindly aware that he is unable to win or keep love
himself by legitimate means. He becomes, as he must, humiliated,
and the humiliation rankles and festers in him, turning to aggres-
sion against the one who has caused it.

Unhappily it does not end there, for everyone whose love he
wants in adult life will be identified with his mother, or whoever

166 GUILT

it is who spoiled him, and aggression, varying from childish
sulkiness to real cruelty, is always ready to overwhelm him, and to
enter into and probably break down all his human relationships.

His victim will be whoever loves him, because the fact that
people do love him gives him the power to hurt them; in this way
they are weaker than he is, and he can forget his humiliation by
exerting the only power he has. In the nursery the humiliated
child is likely to pull the wings off flies, in the world those who
love him will take the place of the flies: those who do not love
him, of course, would not tolerate his exactions for an instant.

I do not think this indicates any disproportionate urge for
power in human nature, but only a natural wish to be independent
and to be able to use the will normally. People who have not been
frustrated seldom become violent or insanely ambitious, it is the
‘humiliated who lose all sense of proportion, seek out the defence-
less and weak and abuse the power they have over them.

When he lives on in the adult, the spoilt child will usually
exert his power in the old way, by causing anxiety, by making
excessive demands; he will use his weakness as a weapon, domi-
neer by illness, by helplessness, and hurt others by coldness,
ingratitude, and outbursts of frightened and wounding jealousy.

Crushing by overseverity also produces a humiliated, because
helpless, child. The child who is made to fear those whom he
should be able to love, whose every act, even every thought, is to
be motivated by his parents’ relentless authority, can no more
develop self-respect and initiative than the spoilt one.

He will certainly have an attitude of aggression and probably
resort to violence. He will secretly feel that everyone is his natural
enemy, and that they are stronger than he is. Supposing everyone
to be down on him, ready to deny his right to live, he will
think that any open expression of his own wishes will rouse
hostility. He is always on the defensive because he sees a dan-
gerous enemy in everyone. Sometimes he will try to get his own
way by cunning, sometimes by violence. In extreme and tragic
cases he will simply seek for victims who are little and weak
through whom he may ease his humiliation. In this there is a key
to the reason why people capable of the most appalling crimes

THE CHILD IN MAN 167

often seem excessively meek and gentle. Indeed one should be-
ware of those who always flatter, and who cannot say “no” to an
invitation or to anyone who wishes to sell them something.

In his confession, the Diisseldorf murderer, who was outwardly
the gentlest of men, but roamed the darkness looking for little
children to murder, stated that he had been crushed and bullied
unmercifully by his father, and had begun to murder smaller
children than himself at the age of nine, with feelings of exalta-
tion.

Less terrible, but tragic enough, alcoholism is often the result
of oppressing a child.

The cynical child, who becomes actually hostile to God and to
all authority and order, is usually the child whose parents have
betrayed him, the child of the broken home, the faithless marriage.

Instinctively a little child accepts without doubting the certainty
and permanence of his home. He believes that he comes first in
his parents’ love, without question, and with the innocent egoism
of babyhood he accepts his kingship as his right. For all practical
and psychological purposes he expects of his parents all that he
actually has from God; they are God to him. H they betray him,
they destroy his innate faith, and strike at God and all that is in
any way representative of God. The betrayed child will grow up
with a grudge against life, his attitude will be one of mistrust.
His natural enemy (as he will think) is authority. He will wish
to revenge himself on God. From his ranks most delinquents
come.

Do not imagine that most delinquents are those who find their
way into the children’s courts. There are as many or more among
the so-called “privileged classes,” hidden away behind the doors
of the private consulting-rooms of the psychiatrists or under the
wide skirts of wealthy relations. But they do not always go on en-
joying such comfortable and such private hiding-places. Evil is
too strong and too dark a current to be held back for long by un-
aided human hands. It breaks down the banks of the most self-
sacrificing and protective natural love and sweeps away the pitiful
attempts that men and women make to dam it up.

168 GUILT

Go to the prisons, go to the mental hospitals; there you will
find the twisted child in man, the spoilt, the frustrated, the be-
trayed child, the child who for a time was denied, locked up and
hidden, but who has broken through the adult’s defences and
taken control.

You will not find the sweetness, the winning and endearing
qualities, that sentimentalists associate with childhood, but on the
contrary much that is cruel and aggressive and overbearing, even
much that is murderous—the appalling mixture of naked evil and
innocence which in the actual child is, because of his physical
littleness, impotent, but in the criminal or the insane person is
terrible with the ruthlessness of the child who has not yet the use
of his reason or the control of his will, but has the grown man’s
physical strength and power to destroy.

Because original sin is not a pious fancy but a terrible fact,
human nature, even before the dawn of reason, is awry. Because
of it, tiny children who cannot sin can suffer pain and terror and
grief and death; they can be crippled or misshapen. In the
orthopaedic hospital they lie stretched out on splints, minute
crucified Christs.

The pattern of evil can also be stamped on them psychologi-
cally, there together with the image of God, baffling everything
in us but Faith. A tiny child, who because he is baptised but not
yet capable of sin must if he died go straight to heaven, can
nevertheless show us a map of evil.

In most insanity there is some regression—that is, a return,
usually a sudden return, to some stage of the patient's early child-
hood. Usually the occasion of this is an intolerable situation which
the adult cannot face, but which because of conflict in himself he
forces himself to try to face. Thus a soldier who feels very in-
tensely that it is wrong to kill, and equally that it is wrong not
to go into battle to defend his country, will often escape the
situation by what used to be called shell-shock, and usually is
simply a flight backwards to the merciful irresponsibility and
helplessness of childhood. There are heroes of the last two wars
who are crawling on all fours, playing with toys, learning to eat

THE CHILD IN MAN 169

with a spoon, trying, less successfully than real babies, to learn
to talk.

There are countless other cases of regression even more tragic,
because the sufferer is frightened, and in proportion to his
fright he is violent. The child in him, who has taken control, to
whom he has surrendered his whole personality, his whole will,
is a frightened child, and a frightened child is an aggressive one.
He wants and tries to use violent means to assert his will; because
he is little and powerless he will do all that he can to force his
wishes upon those who can grant them.

Witness an infant kept waiting for his feed; he will not croon
softly and smile for it, he will open his mouth and scream, he
will go red in the face and beat the air with his fists; he would
like to beat something more vulnerable than the air. It is because
he feels powerless that he uses violence, and only because he is
little that his violence is powerless.

Angry little children shout out “I will kill youl”, and so they
might if they were able to, for they mean what they say. They
have not learnt to overcome obstacles by reason or skill, they have
not the least idea of the value of human life, they do not realize
that, having killed you once, they will not have the satisfaction of
doing it again. The fairy-stories given to the dear little child
by his gentle maiden aunt really tell us what is in his own heart,
for that is their real birthplace, and there they would be con-
ceived and told and retold if they were not put into his hands.
They give him ample opportunity of identifying himself with the
killer, who is always the hero of the story, always the most loved
character in it, and who always kills someone enormously bigger
and more powerful than himself, a giant or a dragon; and mark
this, the giant or the dragon usually has not one head to be cut
off but several, and so can be killed several times.

In the regressed adult, frightened by the many-headed monster
of civilization, or his own environment, or whatever it may be,
you have the most dangerous person imaginable: the unreasoning
child who stamps and screams in the nursery “T will kill youl”
is not now helpless, though his feeling of helplessness is still the

170 GUILT

aggravating factor, but with a man’s strength, the adult body, the
heavy fist which can in fact kill.

However, in spite of the increasing neurosis and crime and
insanity in our days, it is not the deeply humiliated child or the
cynical child who prevails in our society, but the negative child.

At first sight it seems that this child, who is the child of the
vast majority of colourless mediocre parents, is less tragic than
the others, but I think the truth is that he is only less spectacular.
The others are helped by society, even if it is only in order that
society be protected from them, but the negative child will have
no help at all unless he helps himself, he has no escape from
a dilemma which he feels, and is, inadequate to face; and to a
very large extent his existence in such huge numbers is a cause
of the other tragic children’s existence.

The negative child is the one in whom childhood remains
buried, so that it never becomes a power in his life. His emotional
education has been colourless, and so limited as to be almost
negligible. Heaven forbid that anyone suppose that in speaking
of emotional education, I am advancing the idea of parents
“forming” their child’s character, of “making” him as they wish
him to be. This seems to me presumption. It should at least pre-
suppose the parents themselves to be perfect and to have con-
ceived an idea of their child which is exactly identical with God’s!

Parents have very seldom formed themselves, and they are very
often incapable of doing so; moreover, when they are materialists
they are absolutely incapable of having any conception at all of
God's conception of a child, and this no matter what religion they
profess.

The only really effective way in which anyone can educate a
child is by educating himself. The only really effective way in
which anyone can “form” a child is by forming himself. If a man
is whole, his wholeness can be his gift to his child. If he has
integrity, he can give that to his child. An integrated person is
one who has become whole, and wholly himself, through oneness
with Christ, and through Christ’s response to the Father. He,
and we have it on Christ’s word, is a light, “the light of the world.”

THE CHILD IN MAN 171

It is in the light of God radiating from his parents that a little child
can develop the perfection and power of childhood. This is on the
natural plane; I am not speaking in terms of mysticism or miracles,
but in terms of nature, of the natural, and normally inevitable,
psychological process in human nature.

For very much longer than most people realize, the child is one
with his mother, for long after birth has severed the physical
union the child’s psyche (which means all the invisible parts of
his nature) is united to his mother’s soul. The mother’s soul is the
natural environment of the little child’s psyche, in which, given
the right conditions, the loveliness of essential childhood can un-
fold from the seed and grow towards its flowering.

From time immemorial, humanity has known the earth to be the
symbol of motherhood. Not only the mother’s body, but her soul
too, is like the earth. In it the child’s psyche can grow. But only
if the mother’s soul, like the earth, is penetrated by light, and
saturated by the living water of life. She has no direct power to
give life. It is the man, the husband, who can give natural life;
the man, the priest, who through the sacraments can give super-
natural life. In the supernatural order, the priest, through the
power of his priesthood, is the giver of Christ's life. It is he who
can change bread and wine to the living Christ, to be the life-
giving food of mankind. He who can give the life of Christ in
Baptism, and who can even give back life to the soul that is dead
by the words of absolution.

In the physical union of man and woman in the natural plane,
it is the man who gives the seed of life, the woman who is fer-
tilized by it. He is the seed, she is the earth. But it is in the woman
that the life that is given grows, and we learn from the earth that
rest and darkness and secrecy are essential for the growth of life.

Christ made no exception of himself. Indeed nature itself is only
an imitation of him. He gave the whole world life, by plunging
his own light into the darkness of his Mother’s womb.

The man may be compared to the sun. If he is one with Christ,
he will radiate, not his own light, but the light of God from his
soul. Here we touch upon the glory of marriage. It is not only the
giving of natural life, but also of supernatural life. The husband's

172 GUILT

love, which has become sacramental, shines down into the dark-
ness and secrecy of the woman’s soul, penetrates it with a ray of
God, making it a soil in which even the psychological life of the
newborn child can unfold.

A flower is a wonder of loveliness, tethered by a green thread
to the soil that has nourished it. It is lifted between earth and
heaven; it is living water given form and colour by the sun, the
blossoming of water and light. It is a true image of the little child
whose environment in his mother’s soul is the environment of God.
Informed by the mystery of the baptismal water, rooted in earth,
he too stands between earth and heaven shaped and coloured
through and through by the uncreated light.

But when the light of God is not in the mother, then we have a
‘psychological environment in which children cannot grow natu-
rally. No one else can wholly take the place of the mother, because
she has the sacramental love of her marriage. The child of a
mother in whom the light is darkness is more truly an orphan
than the naturally orphaned child whose mother’s soul may still
surround it from Eternity.

The tragic, negative child is the child of materialists. His mother
must be compared not to the earth, but to an underground cellar.
She has built a wall between herself and nature. (Remember, it
is part of human nature to be irradiated by supernatural love. )
She has put a stone floor between her consciousness and the earth
that is part of herself and a stone ceiling between herself and
the blue sky of heaven. She has built four walls around her against
the light. The result is very like a tomb.

If a plant is put to grow in a cellar, it will be weak and colour-
less and twisted; it will not grow upright, but to one side, in one
direction, twisting and straining towards any little chink that lets
in even a pinpoint of light. To this plant the materialist’s child
may be compared. |

The materialist lives in a world of things. Not those living sub-
stances, capable of carrying supernatural and natural life, of being
living symbols of love, capable even of transubstantiation. He
lives in a world of lifeless, soulless things. His treasures are things
in which there is no potentiality of life, and yet he clings to

THE CHILD IN MAN 173

them as fearfully and pitifully as if they were his only guarantee
of life.

It is a matter of awareness. He is unaware of the invisible
world. To him, only the most perishable things are security, be-
cause only the most perishable things are reality.

Even on the superficial plane, the child whose environment is
materialism is liable to grow up a colourless, visionless human
being. He is likely to bring an attitude of anxiety and fear to life.

A child’s natural inheritance is of the invisible world, his right
and his necessity is wonder and mystery. In everyone’s “uncon-
scious” there are, besides the terrible shadow of evil, depths upon
depths of mystery, of knowledge, and of the accumulated beauty
of the ages of mankind.

In overcivilized men, materialists above all, the whole of that
force of spiritual life is inhibited; they have repudiated it com-
pletely, But in primitive people and children it is much closer to
conscidusness, it is the unguessed motivating power of much that
they do, the secret of many of their incommunicable joys and
sorrows.

Every child born into the world inherits original sin from his
parents with all its resulting conflict and darkness, the guilt and
potential suffering which Jung has named the shadow. But he also
inherits the structure of his brain that has been formed by the
experience, not only of darkness, but of light, by generation after
generation of human beings; the experience of humanity of which
Christ is the pattern, and which has been indwelt by Christ in
individual after individual.

Man does not inherit his Christ-consciousness, that comes to
each individual from his own personal response to Christ’s action
upon him; but he inherits a humanity which can be compared
to the bed of a great river, shaped as it is by the continual flow-
ing of the water through it, so that only a reversal of nature
could prevent it from flowing on in the same channels. This river
is a symbol of the great stream of memory, tradition, emotion, de-
sire and fear that has motivated mankind through the ages, flow-
ing through the individual heart of every man, shining from the
touch of Christ, but muddy from the touch of man. Like the

174 GUILT

flowing river, it sometimes moves underground in darkness, some-
times on the surface, sometimes it flows freely and sweetly, some-
times it is dammed up and bursts its banks.

Thus the forces that have returned to the world again and again
in individual after individual through the ages act upon each
one’s human nature, moving through the deep grooves of the
“unconscious” and the conscious mind. Jung, borrowing from
St. Augustine, names these forces “archetypes.” They are usually
in the unconscious, but sometimes they break through into con-
sciousness in the forms of symbols, dreams, and fantasy, in art or
poetry, and in the myths and fairy stories of the world.

To many people the “unconscious” simply means some part of
the mind, like a dungeon, where a man’s “repressions” are
locked away out of sight. There is nothing in this dungeon, they
imagine, but what man has thrust into it himself, those things in
himself which he refuses to accept because he thinks them too
disreputable or too violent or brazen to be tolerated by the
pseudo-self which he has built up to save his face.

The unconscious is very far from being a dungeon. It contains
very much more than our inhibitions or repressions. Just beyond
the ordinary reach of awareness, in that mysterious part of our
being, is our childhood and our infancy. Our first fears are there
certainly, but so is our first reassurance. All our memories are
there, every experience we have known in any way, those that
were always out of reach of thought as well as those which
thought has reflected, the experiences of feeling and the senses
and apprehensions of every kind that are still undefined.

Look at an old peasant woman in her wooden rocking-chair by
the fireside, rocking happily to and fro as she dozes in the warmth
of the flames; she is still being rocked to sleep in her wooden
cradle by the young mother whose tender face is a memory. They
know little of human nature who say that a new-born infant is
only a little animal needing no reassurance and no spiritual en-
vironment, because he has no memory of his first days and weeks
of life. That earliest reassurance will still be the reassurance of
his soul when he comes to die. All through his life, if in the begin-
ning he was loved intelligently, from the depths of his uncon-

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THE CHILD IN MAN 175

sciousness reassurance will come to him in his need, and he will
know in secret the security of the strong arms that first encircled
him and of the first love that fostered his life.

How often flickers of beauty drift into our consciousness, un-
recognized as memories, and not only in dreams. We do not know
where they come from, or why—seeming such trifling things, and
so evasive that we can never quite lay hold of them—they yet stir
us so profoundly. Indeed in a mysterious moment, that seems no
more than a moment of nostalgia for an already half forgotten
dream, the whole course of our life may be changed. We may
hardly know what it is, what memory came to us hidden in the
flicker of flames on the wall, in the sound of bells ringing across
the fields, or the glimpse of the tea-table through the window of
a lamp-lit room; yet it has restored us to the simplicity which
we had supposed our complex maturity had lost for ever.

What gives these fragmentary and subtle experiences their
extraordinary effectiveness? Surely the fact that they are forgotten
memories, the earliest tenderness, the earliest delight opening
their secret flowers again in the secret places of our soul.

We go through life with dark forces within us and around us,
haunted by the ghosts of repudiated terrors and embarrassments,
assailed by devils, but we are also continually guided by invisible
hands, our darkness is lit by many little flames, from night lights
to the stars. Those who are afraid to look into their own hearts
know nothing of the light that shines in the darkness.

God’s dealings with man have had their effect on the uncon-
scious, the story of Creation, of course, and the eternal Christ.
Naturally evil is there too, since man has brought Satan into the
story, but as well as evil, there are aeons of light. The child of
materialists is taught to inhibit all this mystery and beauty at an
early age, and at the same time to blind himself to the evil in
himself. Neither is he taught about God, for the parents cannot
teach what they do not know. It is hardly surprising that he grows
up a spiritually feeble, colourless man, lacking the qualities that
are in the vital child, who knows God—a certain divine reckless-
ness, a delight in the freely given loveliness of the world, and
trust that overcomes fear.

176 GUILT

One in whom childhood has been nipped in the bud, so that
the essential childhood has never come to its full flower in him;
who has learnt early through the materialism of his environment
and the spiritual blindness of his parents to frustrate the super-
natural in himself, or at least his own consciousness of it, grows
up not knowing himself, having missed the loveliest experiences
of his natural childhood, and having been crippled for his adult
life.

He knows very little of himself, and though he is vaguely un-
happy, he often has a tragic resignation to the aimlessness and
mediocrity of his life. It is the men and women in whom real
childhood is not developed at all who fill up the ranks of the
great unfulfilled. It is impossible to contemplate them, this great
multitude of nerveless, defeated, unchilded children, and not to
echo St. Teresa of Avila, speaking from the passionate heart in
which love had defeated compromise: “I think I should like to
cry aloud and tell everyone how important it is for them not to
be contented with just a little.”

Chapter Xvi. THE CHILD IN GOD

“One secret at least had been revealed to her, that beneath the thick
crust of our actions the heart of the child remains unchanged, for the
heart is not subject to the effects of time.” —FRANCOIS MAURIAG,
Thérése®

WE LyrvE in a world of disenchantment, but there can be few who
have not at some time or other experienced that sudden poignant
sharpening of awareness which reveals the sheer loveliness of our
environment, a loveliness we had been blind to before.

Sometimes there is an obvious cause: we are looking at our
childhood’s home for the last time; or our little street has been
threatened with destruction, and now, after last night’s bombing,
it is still there, but seen for the first time; or we ourselves are
threatened, by parting or by death: we shall not see this familiar
Street many more times.

But more often there is no explanation at all. We got up in
the morning as blind and insensitive as before, and suddenly, like
the unpredictable breath of the Spirit, the wonder of the world
we live in is upon us. We see. We see the dearness of the little
drab houses, the pathos of the two crooked chimneys that lean
together, the purity of the flowering weed growing on the ash
heap, the blue of the sky above the chimneys. It is as if we have
dimly experienced something like Tabor; we have seen the in-
visible in the visible, touched the intangible in the tangible, felt
the inexpressible loveliness of the supernatural world within the
natural one.

To a child this is not a passing experience, but the commonplace
of every day. If he is a real child, in whom the essential qualities

® (New York: Henry Holt, 1947).
177

178 GUILT

of childhood are alive and vibrant, he walks every day in a world
of mystery and wonder, and receives the loveliness of it into his
soul and into his senses. If he runs on the sea-shore, the cool
breeze, the light movement of the little waves, and even the drift
of the white clouds overhead, are in his blood. He feels the
multitudinous golden grains of soft sand through his thin sandals;
he is like the sea-shell he lifts to his ear to listen to the singing of
the oceans—a tiny, fragile creature into which the beauty of the
world is poured.

To him the world is more like a person than a dead thing, a
person capable of magic, one who at will can suddenly scatter the
shore with sea jewels or the woods with primroses or the dusk
with stars. A person whose love is round him in the milky softness
of the spring sun, in the coolness of the early morning and the
drowsy heat of noon, and folds him in the silence of darkness.

A child, not vitiated by grown-up people’s materialism, is aware
of the mystery of love in all creation; his environment is an inex-
haustible source of delight to him. Wherever he turns, he finds
treasure.

Water is his comrade; he can float and swim in it; it supports
him and touches him with the touch of ecstasy. Fire is his friend;
he walks through the dry. leaves of autumn woods and kindles it
in the clearing to cook himself a little meal, or for the joy of the
flickering and dancing flames; and the flames leap and blazé for
him until their gold and coral light shines from his own face. The
rain is his friend, and the sunlight, and the snow. The stars belong
to him.

A world of animals and birds and fishes is given to him, not
only out in the open country, but in the cities, for he has his
heritage wherever he is. Animals, strange and beautiful, grotesque
and lovable, are his; dogs and cats and squirrels and rabbits,
sparrows and wild birds, speckled fishes and silver minnows.

He is in fact like Adam, a new man, for whom the whole world
is made, because he himself is new.

But the child inhabits more worlds than one; he lives not only
in the world of nature with all its mystery, but in the world of
myth and fairy-story.

THE CHILD IN GOD 179

Adults for the most part imagine that it is only from the
brightly illustrated books that the child learns fairy-stories; but
they are wrong; they are already present to him in his uncon-
sciousness, which is not only his own unconsciousness but that of
all children of all races and all time; and among children I include
primitive peoples of any age who keep the quality of childhood
and are influenced, as children are, by the symbols of mythology
and, as children do, see personality and individuality in every-
thing, in wind and water and trees and all else.

Many adults, especially those who are materialists, try to deny
their children experiences of sorrow or fear, and the knowledge
of evil. They sometimes realize the terrible character and ter-
rifying themes' of many traditional fairy-stories, though more
often they have forgotten them and innocently hand the books to
their children, who having been kept in ignorance of the fact of
death, turn over the pages until they come to the Babes in the
Wood lying dead in each other’s arms, while the birds cover them
with leaves; or Snow White in her crystal coffin surrounded by
the little gnomes in their peaked red caps and patched breeches,
red-nosed and red-eyed from weeping. Or while the parents
congratulate themselves on the child’s quietness, he is in the
corner relishing every word of the horrible story of Blue Beard!

But even if the child is denied the book, the fairy-stories will
invade his secret soul and give him those tremendous experiences
to which he has a right and which he inherits from all childhood.
He must walk into the tangled and enchanted woods and
there, lost among the shadows and mists under the tall trees,
encounter witches and wolves, magicians and gnomes. He must
be led by a compelling spirit of adventure out onto the invisible
plains and wildernesses, where he will meet the dragons that
breathe fire and have seven lives: and climb the steep cliff to
the enchanted castles where the giants await his challenge, and
smelling his human blood from far off, lick their lips and mutter
with muttering that comes to him like the rumbling of thunder.

Moreover, he must find the tiny things of magic, the little ones
under a spell: the Frog Prince with his whole polished green body
quaking in the beating of his heart, and his golden crown on his

180 GUILT

little flat head. He must enter the enchanted garden where
Beauty comforts the poor shaggy Beast, whose tears make dark
rivulets on his furry face; and he must go up the winding stairs,
through the great curtains of hanging cobwebs, to the tower
where the Sleeping Beauty lies awaiting the kiss of love.

All this the child is led to because he has the right to experience
fear and compassion and love. If these things are kept from him in
the conscious world, he will be led to encounter them in the inner
world where he inherits, not merely fantasies, but childhood
itself.

In his inner world of fairy-story there is a central figure, a
redeeming and saving figure, and with him the child will identify
himself. This is the figure of the Hero.

The Hero stands radiant at the heart of every fairy-story. Either
he is the King’s son, or else he is a poor woman’s child who in the
end wins the Princess and the kingdom by defeating evil. Some-
times, as in Jack and the Beanstalk, he is given some magic seed
that he must bury in the earth; or, like Aladdin, a lamp which
seems no more than a little light to set up in the home, but in fact
has magical power.

When he is the King’s son, it usually happens that the Prince
falls in love with a maiden of low estate, a beggar-maid, a
shepherdess or some such; and to win her he too puts on the
clothes of a beggar and comes to woo her as a poor and ragged
boy, needing the poor girl’s pity and kindness.

The Hero, whether he is in crimson and gold or the peasant
clothes of a working woman’s son, is always both saviour and
lover. He goes out to meet the terror, faces the evil thing threat-
ening the kingdom; alone with his sword he strikes off the seven
heads of the dragon, and returning with his wounds upon him
like jewels, he claims the bride his humility and his valour
have won.

Observe in what detail the Hero, with whom the child inevi-
tably identifies himself, or rather with whom he is already identi-
fied by his destiny, parallels the story of Christ.

The fairy-stories, like the myths, get twisted and confused as
they pass in their great procession from human heart to human

THE CHILD IN GOD 181

heart, from generation to generation; but the deepest meaning of
them always reappears, always emerges from the darkness of the
unconsciousness; they always adumbrate the story of Christ.

It is the story of Christ clothed in the fantasy and symbol that
the child’s heart creates for it, but the deepest meaning and pur-
pose of it is more than fantasy and symbol. It is reality; and it
comes, without any beginning, from Christ in eternity.

Now we see why all the fantasies and symbols, the fairy lore
of all children in all ages, is so alike as to be practically identical.
The story of Christ told in the symbols of the human mind is in
the heart of every child, because every child is made in the image
of the child Christ. Just as it is man’s destiny to be a Christ, so it
is the child’s destiny to be a child-Christ, and Christ is, from his
first human breath to his last, the lover. ;

It is he who is the Prince who comes clothed like a beggar to
the wretched and lowly human heart, to sue for love; he who
goes out in his youth on the great impulse of the Spirit to meet
and overcome evil; he who destroys the dragon whose seven
heads are all the sins, and comes wearing his wounds like jewels
to make the poor, suffering, needy and ignoble human race his
bride. .

The child, because he is made in the image of the Christ-child,
has his inward experience of fear and sacrifice, compassion and
love, by right. No one can take it from him altogether. If people
succeed partially in doing so, they will succeed in the most.ter-
rible act possible to a father or mother: they will crucify the
Christ-child in their child, twisting the instincts of divine love
into that other pattern also innate in a human child, the pattern
of evil.

The child who is taught that there is no evil will still have the
instinct to destroy something, to kill something; and somehow,
sooner or later, he will do it. That which is true of man is equally
true of the child; he is only safe when he is consciously fighting
the evil within himself. He must know it exists, recognize it, and
face it; he must go out to meet it. In him as in man, the Kingdom
of Heaven must suffer violence.

So the real child is aware of more worlds than one. He is aware

182 GUILT

of the natural world and of the supernatural love pervading it;
he is aware of the secret world of all childhood, the world of myth
and symbol and dream. But what is the function of this extraor-
dinarily aware and beautiful and brave thing, childhood, in the
integration of the whole manP

First, to make man carefree. We have been speaking about
fear: the average man or woman enters adult life afraid of fear,
certainly not equipped to face it, not aware that it is an essential
experience of his likeness to Christ. He is not aware, because he
did not come to the full flower of childhood in which he could
have learnt the secret of the Prince: so that the child is now
going into the world only half developed.

But there is something worse than fear that puts the man back.
This is anxiety. Fear is a rather rare, if essential, experience;
anxiety is constant. Fear musters all one’s forces and braces one
to meet it. Anxiety fritters and drains away all one’s courage and
all one’s trust. Fear is reasonable and can be met by reason.
Anxiety is unreasonable and reason does not touch it. The differ-
ence between fear and anxiety is that a man or woman ex-
periencing fear is afraid of some real danger, but a person who is
anxious is afraid of an imaginary or potential danger. Fear is in
proportion to the cause: anxiety is out of proportion. A woman
whose child is lying ill with meningitis has every reason to be
afraid, but a woman who falls into a state of fear because her
child might possibly catch a cold, is definitely the victim of
anxiety neurosis.

Anxiety is the undercurrent of many people’s attitude to life;
it produces hesitation and indecision about everything. The job
a young man is offered may not suit him; he may lose it; he
hesitates to take a room of his own—he may not be able to pay
the rent; he is anxious about the impression he may, or may not,
make on other people: secretly obsessed by guilt, he is anxious
about his health, his moral and physical stamina in the world,
the moral and material consequences of falling in love, and a
multitude of other things. If one anxiety is relieved, another takes
its place immediately.

He soon realizes, if he makes any attempt to overcome his

THE CHILD IN GOD 188

anxiety, that a direct attack is doomed to failure. Friends tell
him to “pull himself together” and to “use his will”; but as the only
method he knows of for using his will consists of an act of violence
to himself which he has not the spiritual force to sustain, the
result is destructive, The fact is that no one can depend upon
himself; and equally, no one can depend permanently on another
human being.

Everyone needs to depend on someone who has qualities which
are not to be found in any human being. He must have absolute
power—power over life and death. He must be always and every-
where present and accessible. He must have illimitable love for
oneself, and for those whom one loves. Short of any of these
assets he is useless. A friend may indeed be a rock of strength
and ready to go down into the depths with us, but he is actually
as powerless as we are in the face of the immensities of fate. A
father may have the most devoted love, but he too is powerless
before life and death; he can only be in one place at a time, and
he is not immortal.

In fact if we are are anxious, all those we love aggravate our
anxiety instead of easing it, for we centre all our exaggerated
fears upon them.

- A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
The folk who are buying and selling
The clouds on their journey above
The cold wet winds ever blowing
And the shadowy hazel grove
Where mouse-grey waters are flowing
Threaten the head that I love.®

Anxiety makes every circumstance intolerable and every
affection a torture. It is equally destructive of supernatural life;
its victims even approach the sacraments in fear of an endless
variety of trifling possibilities which may turn their sacrament
to sacrilege.

Now we see the function of the child in man. It is to trust the

° W. B. Yeats, “The Pity of Love” in Collected Poems (New York: Mac-
millan, 1983).

184 GUILT

Father, God. If the Christ-child is developed in the natural child,
he will trust the Father unquestioningly, and his trust will be
something far more than merely taking it for granted that God
will supply him with his material needs. He will take that for
granted, but he will know that whatever God allows to happen is
allowed only because of his infinite love. God loves him too much
to allow him to suffer anything that is not essential for his ultimate
happiness. Whatever God can possibly spare his child, he will
spare him. This kind of trust can only be come by through direct
knowledge of God the Father; and only the child in man can
have this knowledge. It comes, as we have already said, by
realizing God’s power through our nothingness; knowing his love
through our need.

The child concentrates not upon the dangers around him:
he knows the Father in the whole awareness of childhood,
in the love that is almost audible, almost visible to him: in love-
liness: in the gifts given with such extravagance of joy in giving:
in the impulse that has overcome evil and possessed the Kingdom
through all the ages of Christ-childhood.

The only way in which anyone can learn to trust is by knowing
the Father, and the only way to know the Father is to foster the
Christ-child in us, since only he knows the Father’s love through
the direct experience of his own littleness.

It is not enough to wait for the crisis and then make verbal
acts of faith in God. Such acts are again only acts of violence to
the human will. It is absolutely necessary to learn to know the
Father, as only the child can—every day, always, as the back-
ground and sustenance of our whole life.

There is a second function of the child in man which is a
necessity for man’s happiness. It is to make new. At the root of at
least half of man’s discouragement is his staleness and his inability
to rid himself of the old sores and miseries of his old sins and
SOrrows.

Everyone longs to be made new, to be young, to be born again
—not merely to be patched up, or made to look young. Even
wounds drag at our vitality less when they are new than when

THE CHILD IN GOD 185

they are old: the ache of an old wound wearies, it has a long,
long accumulation of fatigue behind it. The anguish of an old
sorrow corrodes, it sinks deeper and deeper in, and gradually
saturates more and more of our thought and saps more and more
of our vitality: and old sins are unimaginably destructive. People
have the curious delusion that the guilt of a sin committed long
ago and unconfessed, grows less with time; but the truth is it
acts in the soul as a slow poison does in the body, spreading a more
and more misplaced and dissipated guilt feeling all over the
personality, until every pleasure is overshadowed by vague
anxiety or fear. Sometimes the end is despair and insanity.

The child is always new, childhood is new, and to the child
the world is new every day. He has no past, except the ever
present past of all childhood; he has no apprehension about the
future: he lives in the eternal—now. Old sin does not remain in
a child; he has the humility that confesses and knows the imme-
diate joy of the Father. By his very nature he is new. The Christ-
child in man is the continual renewal of life, of joy, of the capacity
for joy, of trust.

Because the world is always new to a child, and every lovely
thing in it, every pleasure, every experience of love, is new to
him, he is never bored or blasé or dependent on material things
for his delight. He cannot help retaining the sense of wonder, he
cannot help keeping the poet alive in the man whom he inhabits.
He is the echo through all time of the cry of the young Christ,
of birth and resurrection: “Lo! I make all things new.”

It is not only at the beginning of adult life that the child is
necessary for man’s integrity. In the beginning, the child gives him
the trust in the Father which in turn gives him the courage to face
the world, to overcome obstacles and to wrestle with evil, to dare
to live and to dare to love.

In mature life—with more responsibilities and with the inevi-
table loss of many on whom he tried to depend; with more
puzzling sorrows; with many seeming injustices to accept, and
with the early natural sense of wonder wearing out—the child
is again his renewal and trust and the secret of maintaining his
joy and zest in living.

186 GUILT

In old age, when even on the natural plane he must in so many
ways become like a little child again, the humility of the child
sweetens his humiliation in growing old, and the child’s love of the
Father brings him ultimate comfort and peace.

The secret of childhood is knowing the Father, and knowing the
Father is-the secret of trust, the remedy for anxiety, the over-
coming of evil. And this is because to know the Father is to know
ourselves loved and possessed by the power of the Trinity.

Once again, it will not be through any superhuman effort, any
violence of the will, that we shall bring the child in us to its full
flower. It will not be through going against nature, through
achieving some kind of austerity that can make poverty and want
attractive to us. On the contrary, it will be through not frustrating
the child who is already in us, and always because of the uncon-
querable strength of nature, ready to wax strong in us—ready
even if it has already been frustrated. If only by the simple proc-
ess of responding to the Father’s love, we will restore the
frustrated little child to his kingdom.

The response to the Father’s love will not demand any mystical
flight from us; it will come naturally to us if we look for it in
everything around us. That in itself will restore the child in us,
for it will be the beginning of continual awareness of the beauty
of the world, of the visible in the invisible, of the realization of
the gifts that are strewn under our feet. Following on this new
awareness, and all the right values which inevitably go with it,
we will be able to make spontaneous acts of faith in the Father’s
love in all our circumstances, and even in all his dealings with
those we love.

There is a certain strange detachment peculiar to children
which is always baffling and sometimes shocking to adults; but
it is grounded in the child’s consciousness of the eternal world and
his certainty of the Father’s love. He does not analyze it, he could
not explain it, but there it is. He is not upset by poverty or con-
cerned about the next meal or what he will wear; he is confident
that somehow all he needs will be given, and pathetically content
with whatever it is when it comes. He is curiously indifferent even
about the deaths of people he knows and is fond of; death itself

THE CHILD IN GOD 187

has no finality for him. Eternal life, the unfailing love of the
eternal Father, the new world of loveliness that it gives to him
daily, these things are real to him.

The child in the adult will not make the adult callous and fool-
hardy, but it will give him just that strange crystalline hardness
that makes him able to suffer even cruel circumstances without
being made incapable of recovery and new joy. It will make him
able to enjoy life in poverty if need be, and to accept bereavement
without being completely broken by it. As the child is restored
in him, he will cease to be overcome by anxiety, and even as he
grows daily to love the world more and to delight in it- more,
he will also become consciously less dependent on it and more
dependent on the Father, who made it for him. He will say: “And
elsewhere, Lord, thou hast laid the foundations of the earth at
its beginning, and the Heavens are the works of thy hands. They
will perish, but thou wilt remain, they will be like a cloak that
grows threadbare, and thou wilt lay them aside, like a garment,
and exchange them for new.”

Chapter Xvu. THE SON

“The hearty man is inclined, shrugging his shoulders and rather dis-
dainfully, to gloss over how intensely the sensitive man looks for con-
firmation of himself, and of his innermost being, for faith and
acceptance, to his own family and breaks down when he feels that he
isn’t understood in his own home.”—max sBRop, Franz Kafka: A
Biography?

THE VERY YOUNG CHILD suffers from the materialism of his parents
without wholly realizing it, but when the child has grown to
adolescence, the suffering becomes only too well realized, and
takes the form largely of anxiety and fear, the worst possible
preparations for adult life. Not only does his parents’ own attitude
foster this by its very existence in them, but they frequently drive
it deeper and deeper into him by a stream of suggestion intended
by them to have the opposite result.

They continually repeat to him that it is by no means easy to
eam money, and that this must be the main preoccupation of his
life, on which everything else will depend; on what he has, not
what he is, will the world’s esteem depend. He will certainly be
made to feel guilty if his inclinations are towards a life which, if
it is lived honourably, must in our days almost certainly mean
poverty, such as the life of a poet or an artist. They impress upon
his shrinking mind the fact that their own lives have been one
unremitting struggle endured for the single object of fitting him
for a life equally drab and formidable, and if he sits over his
homework biting his pencil, ruffling his hair, with a vacant look
in his eyes, they remind him that he will not always have them
to fall back on, and therefore he must matriculate or perish.

* (New York: Schocken Books, Inc.).
188

THE SON 189

There is a type of parent, who has struggled out of real poverty
by hard work, and who in his own boyhood suffered great hard-
ship, who seems to feel that he owes his own children as well as
young people generally a grudge for what he had to endure. He
never ceases to relate stories of his hard lot and his own fortitude,
and seems to resent it if his children enjoy the comparative ease
and comfort that is the fruit of his toil!

Some materialists go further than that; they demand that their
children shall either educate themselves by scholarships, or pay
them back for what has been spent on their education when they
begin to earn money. In these circumstances the boy is a ready
prey to feelings of humiliation, which in extreme cases lead to
neurosis.

If he has never been taught the difference between good and
evil, if, as is very frequent, his conscience has not been educated
at all, he will have an “unresolved guilt conflict”—that is to say,
he will have a shallowly buried sense of guilt, for which there
is no obvious cause, and which is ready to fasten onto any
suggestion made to him. The suggestion made to him countless
times a day by the materialism of his parents will be that all his
finer feelings are guilty—above all, unworldliness is guilty—that
the only way he can prove himself is by succeeding in the com-
petition which begins even at school.

How often we read in the newspapers of the tragedy of boys
and university students committing suicide because—so. the
coroners imagine, or say they do—their minds became temporarily
unbalanced by the strain of overwork for an examination. The
strain here does not begin in overwork; it begins in the fearful
importance with which the parents, as well as the school teachers,
charge the result of the examination. It is emotionally charged
out of all reason; on it depends, in the parents’ eyes, not what
the boy knows, but what he is. His failure will be, not so much his
own disappointment, as a shattering grief for the already martyred
father and mother, a new and unbearable source of guilt for the
boy. Consequently, many brilliant but sensitive boys fail, and
many less intelligent but insensitive ones pass with honours.
Examinations are not a test of knowledge or intelligence, of char-

190 GUILT

acter or intellect or ability, but simply of nerve; and the whole life
of the schoolboy and the undergraduate is measured out by a
series of these nervous crises.

All this nervous tension is bound up with the boy’s relationship
to his parents, and in particular with his relationship to his father,
which is perhaps the most vital thing in his life.

It is not surprising that those who are sensitive shrink from
entering into the unequal competition that commerce offers them,
that anxiety is the undercurrent of their daily life, that they feel
that the essential, holy things are for ever out of their reach, and
so they compromise at every turn.

Instead of adventure they accept security, instead of joy of the
artist in work, the boredom of the wage slave, instead of passion
and love, the mockery of a cautious, self-centred, unnatural and

childless marriage, an unwilling, festering celibacy, or the life of

petty immorality that frustrates human nature.

The young man who has been given no conception of God
the Father, and who has been compelled by the fact that he is
made according to the pattern of the Son of God, to seek for God,
however blindly, in his earthly father, and to look to this earthly
father for the confirmation of his own Christhood, can hardly
escape the fate of deep inward humiliation and shame, of a sense
of his own inadequacy for life, and of being a failure from the
beginning, through compromising on both sides, trying to serve
God and Mammon. ;

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of
Heaven” was never more true than it is today, when everything
that is essential to the peace and joy of living, to happiness in
work and love and home, depends entirely upon having Christ’s
values, and Christ’s trust in the eternal Father.

To nearly every normal small boy his father is unique among
men. In fact, he is God. The boy worships him in secret, perhaps
even secretly from himself. In a way, he is sorry for all other boys,
and feels superior to them because his father is thus and thus,
and he identifies himself with him. In that identification is all his
pride, all his self-esteem. There is nothing about his father that
is ordinary, he is different to all other fathers; even his movements,

THE SON 191

the way in which he swings his hand round to look at his wrist
watch, his manner of walking and sitting, and the way he draws
his breath in when he is smoking his pipe, are uniquely his own.
The smell of him is magnificent too, the particular tobacco he
smokes and the tweed of the old coat that he wears when he is at
home. He is the essence of manhood, and he is God.

It is necessary for the child’s self-confidence that the father
should be perfect, and necessary for his self-esteem that the
father should love him and approve of him, and that he himself
should be like his father.

But the time will come when he will know that his father is
not God. Parents seldom know when the child is disillusioned,
for children are passionately reserved about that which afflicts
them. One, who was quite inarticulate at the time, told me years
afterwards when he was a grown man, how one morning he went
into his father’s dressing room and saw the smeary tooth glass
on the washstand, and knew that his father was just like other
men and other fathers. He could not have spoken to anyone of
the sense of personal humiliation that he experienced. No child
can speak of or understand his own bewildering shame that comes
with the discovery that his father is as ordinary, as sordid and
embarrassing as all other fathers.

But from the time of this discovery, conflict begins in the boy’s
emotions, because it is not simply a matter of vanity to him to
want a Father whom he can worship; it is an instinct at the root
of his being, the fall of his ido] threatens his own being. In some
hidden way, to him inexplicable, the development of everything
positive and vital in himself seems to depend upon his response
to the perfect father whom he himself has created out of his
inner necessity—his own manhood that is shut in the small hard
bud of his childhood needs the sun of his father’s glory to open it.
In the negative mood that follows disillusionment, it begins to
shrivel in bud.

He does not, of course, analyse his emotions and formulate
ideas about them while he is a child; he simply suffers, without
defence, from the dull depression and emptiness that follows dis-
enchantment. The world of his inner life is clouded and its colours

192 GUILT

are made dimmer. Sometimes he becomes openly moody, sulky or
aggressive. Without his having the least idea why, his father’s
company, formerly his delight, is now embarrassing to him. This
is liable, of course, to rouse his father’s anger: and for some
boys the mother’s gentle remonstrance will aggravate the situ-
ation, for it will only stress the father’s limitations, that he must
be bolstered up by a woman, that after all he can be easily hurt
or provoked, and instead of being someone who can be wor-
shipped, he may be someone who must be pitied. Out of such
seemingly trifling conditions hostility can grow, and with it the
boy’s sense of guilt. Indeed the extraordinary and complex effects
of whatever his father’s attitude to him is are knotted into his
ready predisposition to the feeling of guilt; nothing stirs this
more profoundly than an unhappy relationship between father
and son.

But the strange thing is, that even if the son discovers as time
goes on, and long after the childhood disenchantment is almost
forgotten, that the father is not only ungodlike, but is the opposite
to all that he himself admires and could wish to be, he still feels
inferior to him, he still secretly despises himself for being unlike
him, and he will still be discouraged to the point of frustration
by his father’s disapproval.

This attitude becomes completely crippling when the father
is the hearty, insensitive type, in whom a coarse physique and a
certain kind of boisterous egoism are positive elements in his
worldly success; for then the man’s self-confidence will seem to
the boy, and afterwards the young man, to be a reproach to him-
self. He will doubt himself and come to feel that his sensitivity
possibly his frailer body, and his deeper interests and desires
reveal an inadequacy for living! With his father’s ideal of man-
hood unreasonably but persistently obsessing him and colouring
his own, he will be overwhelmed by the feeling of being unable
to face the world and to win his own rights as a man, because
of his lack of his father’s overbearingly masculine qualities.

Such a situation is very common, and it is among the major
causes of the inward humiliation that leads to the ego-neurosis

THE SON 193

- already discussed, with its pitiful withdrawal from maturity on its

very threshold.

Literature, and especially modern literature, is obsessed by
this theme; it is expressed in writing, as it is in life, diversely, and
through the contradictions that arise out of something which is
innate in man and to which he cannot adjust himself. Sometimes
it is shown as consciousness of insignificance and defencelessness,
sometimes a hostility to all authority, even to divine authority, but
it requires no skill to see the child’s tortured obsession about his
father in it all.

That this is particularly a characteristic of modern literature
points to the fact that there is an increase of this father-son com-
plex in our own days. And that it is the theme that has haunted
writers of genius points to the fact that it is closely related to
something that is universal to the human race. For it is the dis-
tinguishing sign of the work of genius that it expresses the
universal experience of all mankind. —_-

The artist no less than the saint is destined to be the vessel
through which all the suffering, joy and love of the whole of
humanity are poured. And this destiny is a doom to those who
resist the Christ-life in themselves, since only the power of Christ
can enable a human creature to surrender to so overwhelming a
destiny and not be broken by it. This is the key to the tragic fre-
quency with which genius meets disaster, as well as to the threat
of insanity that haunts it. Again and again the genius cannot carry
the stress, and he breaks down into neurosis, seeks relief in drugs
and alcohol, or succumbs to the exhaustion that follows the
attempt to pit his own individual little emotions against the tor-

rent of the agelong passions and dreams of the whole human race.

On the one hand we have the swarm of pseudo-artists who are
absorbed in continually refining and polishing a technique,
through which they express only their own peculiarities; they
tend to exclude everyone from their consciousness but a small
clique of admirers, and have no real communion with mankind.
Consequently their art is an ineffective form of neurosis.

On the other hand there is the artist whose voice is the voice

194 _ GUILT

of the whole world, who sheds the tears and burns with the desires
of all humanity. This is the man of genius; the myths and dreams
of the centuries awaken in his soul, and his works crystallize the
joys and sorrow of all mankind. It is significant that the writing
of genius has for some time become more and more concerned
with the father-son situation, and this has also filtered into the
works of writers on the borderline of genius.

There is scarcely a word written by Samuel Butler on any sub-
ject that is not really an expression of the same tortured mixture
of hostility to, and identification with, his father which he revealed
in The Way of All Flesh. It seeps into the novels of D. H.
Lawrence, and snarls out of much of his poetry, where it is con-
fused with class-consciousness.

It is present in the fiction of contemporary Catholic writers in
the critical attitude they often reveal to the priests, who represent
the parent Church which they belong to and love. How often a
priest in a Catholic book is drawn as a mental fumbler, or almost
ludicrous in his purely natural humanness—in fact, the father
who represents God and who disappoints the son.

It would be difficult to invent quite so stupid a priest, even for
so stupid a penitent, as Graham Greene’s Father Rank in The
Heart of the Matter, without the pressure of that disappointment,
and it would be impossible to create Pinkie in Brighton Rock, with
the agonized twist that makes the juvenile delinquent the pitiful
rebel against authority that he is, without having quivered one-
self with the universal suffering of the boy’s disillusionment.

In Jean de Mirbel, the “difficult” boy in Mauriac’s Woman of
the Pharisees, every fine shade of disenchantment, and its pathos
both from the point of view of the child and the parents, is ex-
perienced. It is lived through from beginning to end of the book,
in the boy’s relationship to his uncle, to his mother, and with
culminating beauty in the mutual failure of his relationship with
the, this time wonderful, human and saintly old priest, the Abbé
Calou.

Many other writers could be mentioned, but in one, Franz
Kafka, we have not only a genius whose writing is saturated with
this problem, but one whose personal life was dominated by it,

THE SON 195

and who is the mouthpiece of all the inarticulate children in the
world. In his life of Kafka, Max Brod writes “The child trusts his
parents and wants his parents to trust him too. This is the point
out of which arises one of the first great conflicts to which the
soul of man is exposed.”

The inclination of the boy to make his father a god, and to cling
to the idea that on his father’s approval his own manhood
depends, is much more than a delusion; it is an instinct with a
hidden purpose, which is necessary for the defence of his per-
sonality.

It is an innate instinct which makes the child seek perfection
in his father, and build his own father-idol in his heart. Even the
child who does not know his father or who is orphaned creates an
ideal father in his own mind, for he is driven by the same
necessity, and his fantasy father is a reality to him that has a pro-
found influence on his development. Again, some children who
have had brutal fathers, or who have lost their natural fathers
through death, seek for a father-substitute in some other man.
This applies to girls as well as to boys, and again and again we
find women who have literally idolized an old father, and when he
dies, or soon after, they marry an old man—who is really a
father-substitute.

Dr. Douglas Hubble in an analytical study of James Boswell*®
attributes Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson to his search
for a father-substitute. He says of Boswell and his father: “When-
ever James was in the company of Auchinleck [his father] the
image of himself dwindled until it was no larger than a small boy,
beloved and indulged by his mother, but intimidated by the stern
and sarcastic tongue of Alexander Boswell.” And he adds that the
effect of this was that Boswell sought and found a great and good
father-substitute in Johnson.

The son wants the father’s influence to foster and develop what
is best in himself. But it happens only too often that to fulfill his
father’s ideal for him would be a degradation for the son.

The boy secretly wants the father to approve his own idealism,
to take pride in that, and not only in his successes in examinations

* In The New Statesman, December 28th, 1946.

¥

196 GUILT

and sport. Above all he wants some deep assurance that his own
most intimate spiritual aspirations echo down to him from his
father’s own soul, and are an essential element in his identification
with the father. If the father is irritated or amused by the sensi-
tivity of the boy’s spirit, he may, so illogical is the guilt feeling,
become ashamed of what is holiest in himself. It is only when the

ther loves the best that the son is capable of becoming, that his
love is creative in his son’s life.

What the child wants is a father whom he can adore with illim-
itable confidence, and with whom he is one. This desire is put into
the child by God, and it is given to him to enable him to respond
to the divine Father of whom the earthly one is only an image.

In the beginning, it is true, the human father takes the place

‘ of God in the child’s life, and his human love for his son is God’s
love, but unless the child is told that he has in fact a Father who
is God, of whom his earthly father is only an image, the disillu-
sionment and disappointment must come. If, however, he is
told the truth about God’s fatherhood, and that his earthly father
is fallible and human and yet reflects God’s love in his, all the
longing in the boy’s soul will be filled and overflowing.

He will realize that he has a Father who is God, and whose
gaze does penetrate to the innermost secrets of his soul, and who
desires of him only the best that he is capable of. But though he
wants the finest that the boy desires for himself, this Father has
pity on his weakness and will not forsake him or cease to love
him when he fails him, but on the contrary will restore him to
oneness with himself and lift him up again into his own glory.

In the light of that glory, the hard bud of manhood in the boy’s
heart can open and flower and bear fruit.

The father’s approval is the one reassurance that is necessary
to the individual for his initiation into adult life. The child who
knows God and knows that he is himself inlived by Christ, so
that the eternal Father sees him as his beloved Son, and desires
of him that he will be a Christ in the world, will have this assur-
ance, even if his earthly father fails him, even if he despises him.

It is because the pattern in which every man is created is
inescapably the pattern of Christ, the eternal Son, that the son

THE SON 197

in him clamours persistently for its fulfillment and joy in filial
love and honour. He has come into the world first of all to be a
Christ; to the world, after that condition is assured, he can, if
it is consistent with his own individual Christhood, be a labourer,
a clerk, an artist, a schoolmaster, or enter any other trade or pro-
fession that he is fitted for. He has been sent into the world by
his eternal Father, as Christ was sent into the world, because the
Father “so loved the world that he gave up his only Son to save
the world.”

It is this relationship that should be reflected in that of the
earthly father and son; when it is, the boy who is facing the
adult world has every chance of overcoming the difficulties that
often defeat those who are already humiliated and intimidated
by their father’s materialism and his disapproval of their unworld-
liness.

If he approaches his manhood with the mind of Christ, led as
Christ was by the Holy Spirit, his values will be those of Christ
too. The work he chooses will be his own choice, not something
forced on him, and it will not be chosen as the one most likely
to get him a good social standing or the most money, it will be
one which will enable him to serve God best, and which will be
in itself, as work should be, a means of contemplation.

It is untrue to think, as many people do, that work is a punish-
ment for sin. Before Adam sinned, he was given work to do in
Eden. He was put into the garden of Eden “to dress and to trim
it.” In Eden there was only joy, and all the joy was in contem-
plating God—work, therefore, could only have been one way of
contemplating God. Adam was given the work of a gardener.
Something of his Creator’s joy when he looked upon the world
that he had created and found it was good, must have
quickened in Adam’s heart, when it seemed to him that the first
spring flowed from his finger tips: when those trees and
flowers that he had dressed and trimmed suddenly broke into
profusion of young green life, an increase of loveliness beautiful
to look at, to touch, to smell and to taste, beautiful to listen to.

Only when Adam sinned was hardship and painful effort added
to work; then indeed he was to earn his bread, not easily and

198 GUILT

delightfully, but by the sweat of his brow. Even so, work today
is restored to its dignity and its beauty and can be prayer again.
For Christ restored it to its primal beauty, working in the sweat
of his brow at a carpenter’s trade in Nazareth. Now, work can
be a contemplation, an experience within the worker’s own heart
and mind, both of the Creator’s joy, and of the joy of the Son
who has given the zest of his love to the very effort itself.

One of the greatest justifications for the lives of artists today is
that they show men the joy that can be known simply in doing
work that is good in itself: in order to be free to make
beautiful things rejoicing, they often choose to be poor, as poor as
apostles should be, having only one coat—and that usually not
an overcoat—and no money in their purses!

It is fairly certain, that at all events in the beginning of life
and perhaps all through it, the young man who has not succumbed
to materialism will have to be poor if he is to work and live as
a Christ in the world, he will probably have to be content with
a humble place in his profession, and from the world’s point of
view he will unquestionably be “a fool for Christ’s sake.”

This is not because there is anything opposed to the Christ-life
in success in itself—Christ knew his moments of triumph; the
moments when the people threw down their garments under
the feet of the exultant little donkey that carried him into
Jerusalem; the moments when the whole world went after him,
when the sick became well and the blind saw, and devils went out
of men, and the dead became alive at his touch. And all these ex-
periences glorified his Father—the crowds thronging to hear him
preach were given his Father’s message, they were shown how
the Father could be glorified even in their own dark hearts. The
multitudes who followed the widow with her dead son, the
mourners for the little daughter of Jairus and at the sealed tomb
of Lazarus, all were shown the pity and the power and the glory
of the Father.

So there is a Christ-life in successful life, and one that glorifies
the Father, for men today; but it is one that, as in his own life,
entails relentless effort and a purity of heart and purpose that
few men are capable of. The challenge to the average young man
facing “the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them,” and

THE SON 199

wishing to live a life of natural happiness, to fall in love, to marry,
to make his own home and to bring up his own children, is to
enter into competition with greed, avarice, dishonesty, trickery,
with hordes of relentlessly selfish, self-seeking men and women,
who will ride rough-shod over all fine feeling, who will have
nothing but contempt for idealism, or even honesty, and will
consider it fair game to exploit it. The earthly father who loves
and approves the Christ in his son, will give that son the greatest
help to being a success as a human being, even if he does not give
him much help to being a success as men ordinarily estimate
success.

He will help him towards psychological happiness, and the
courage which does not shrink from growing up, because what-
ever hazards await him, whatever the price of joy in effort and
self-denial and fortitude, he will be certain that always at all times,
in every circumstance, “under him are the Eternal arms.”

If every earthly father gave to his son the love of which he is
trustee, the eternal Father’s love, every son should be able to go
from his boyhood to his maturity as Christ did, with his father’s
spirit resting upon him and his father’s voice, telling his joy in
him, ringing in his ears—with his own pride and glory in his
identification with his father. |

Christ’s entry into his public life takes one’s breath away by its
sheer beauty:

“So Jesus was baptized, and as he came straight up out of the
water, suddenly heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of
God coming down like a dove and resting upox him. And with
that, a voice came from heaven, which said, This is my beioved
Son, in whom I am well pleased” { Matt. 3. 16-17). 7

The child who knows the eternal Father will be the man whe
is able to overcome the inward Jiumiliation that crushes those
who do not, and to face the lahowsr-snil ‘ne loves. of a, mature
life, knowing himself, just as the -variy intuition. of his onild-
hood told him, dependent for his Leing pa kis heavenly Father's
love; without that, nothing. And ‘Licyause: his. father is Gud, and
he is destined to live in the life of God’s only begotten Sox:
“...ason, who is the radiance of his *ather’s splendour, and the
full expression of his being ...” (Heb. 1.3).

Chapter Xvm. THE MEASURE OF JOY

Fain would I be saved: And fain would I save.

Fain would I be released: And fain would I release.
Fain would I be pierced: And fain would I pierce.
Fain would I be born: And fain would I bear.

Fain would I eat: And fain would I be eaten.
Fain would I hearken: And fain would I be heard.
Fain would I be cleansed: Fain would I cleanse.

I am mind of All,

Fain would I be known.

‘Divine Grace is dancing: Fain would I pipe for you.
Dance ye alll!

Fain would I lament. Mourn ye alll!

Fain would I be ordered: And fain would I set in order.
Fain would I be infolded: Fain would I infold.

I have no home: In all I am dwelling.

I have no resting place: I have the earth.

I have no temple: And I have Heaw’n.

To you who gaze, a lamp am I, to you that know a mirror
To you who knock, a door am I, to you who fare, the way.

Ye could not know at all what thing ye endure,

Had not the Father sent me to you as a word.

Beholding what I suffer, ye know me as the sufferer.

And when ye had bekeld it, ye were not unmoved.

But vathér, were tshirled'along. Ye were kindled to be wise.

Hed’ ie known how to' suffer. ye would know how to suffer no more.
Leern how to suffer and ye ‘shell overcome.

“Know in me the words of wisdom!
"And with me cry again— <'»
Glory to. Theo, Fatheth «> 7+:
Glony td-Thee, Word! .
Glory to Thee, Holy Spirit!
: ones "2° Amen.

~ * From noxst’s “The Hymn of Jesus”°

‘ "Trans, from the Apocryphcl Acts of St. John.
in 3 ts 200

. oe - i
Ce Sh Pte aa e nt

a e

THE MEASURE OF JOY 201

WE Turn at last from the pitiful figure of man broken and
twisted by guilt, and by his futile efforts to escape from the
suffering of guilt, to man restored to the image of God in which
he was created—the miracle of man inlived by Christ and given
the power of his love. In his presence we no longer sigh after the
lost image of God, but stand amazed before the splendour of the
redeemed man in whom the risen Christ lives on. To become
whole, to live fully, to be in harmony with himself, each individual
must turn his face to God. He must live consciously in the life of
divine love, he must know himself to be in the Being of God.

But now, God takes him and quietly turns his face back to the
earth; very lovingly he reminds man that he cannot love God
without loving his fellow men. Neither is God content that his
little creature, whom he put into the world that was made to be
the cradle of his Son, should despise anything in that world.

He is to remember that his body and the bodies of those he
loves are made from its dust, and he is to delight in the loveliness
of life that flowers in them from that dust. His senses are meant
to delight him in the life of flesh and blood, blossoming into the
softly coloured skin of men and women and children to the
warmth of ivory, of gold and brown, of rose and ebony. He is to
put his hand on the pulse of the human heart and marvel at the
miracle of its beating, he is to realize the beauty and the mech-
anism of the lovely filigree of bones, of the unfathomable mystery
of the human brain and of physical life itself.

But God has made the dust not only lovely, but holy, for God
has made himself in dust. He has made himself in the substance
of human nature, and he abides in man.

Through the ages Christ lives on in man, and because Christ
is love itself, mature man is a lover, his maturity is love. The
meaning of man’s life on earth is to transmit life through love.
He lives fully only when his living is a giving and interchange of
life; and this, in God’s plan, is not to be done in a vague insub-
stantial way, but through visible, tangible things, through the
profound simplicity of the sanctity of natural love.

In order that we may never forget this, God has locked man’s
salvation in the commonest materials, water, bread, wine and oil.

202 GUILT

To give life is the meaning of love, and the deepest compulsion
of love is for the lover to give not just life, but his own life, his
own body and blood, his own heartbeat; his giving of life to the
beloved must be his giving of self. This compulsion is from
Christ, and only the man in whom Christ has risen from death
and lives can know the completeness of love that comes from this
self-giving.

To enable man to achieve this—and yet more wonderful, to
achieve it himself as man—Christ by his incarnation, by his touch
upon the world, has made human nature sacramental nature. For’
this purpose the Father created the pure and selfless substances
of the world: for this the Spirit breathed upon the water, and the

Son laid his blameless hands upon the bread.
' The life which men are to give to one another on earth is the
risen life of Christ. It is the life which has overcome death, the life
in which self-love has died, and to which the lover has been born
again, made new.

Christ has overcome the world in the heart of this new man,
and he comes from the dark night to the morning of his resurrec-
tion awakened, he sees a new heaven and a new earth with newly
opened eyes. He touches the material things of life with awakened
hands, hands that bear Christ’s wounds and have his power, and
restored as he is through Christ to the primal beauty of his like-
ness to his Creator, his experience becomes no less than an inward
experience of God within himself—his life, and the life his living
transmits, is his Creator’s joy in the goodness of his creation.

The years before him will consist of gradual experience of the
wonder which is at once too simple and too mysterious for him to
ynderstand—or to grasp at all, except by Faith—namely that his
daily life is a life of miracles, that whatever he makes, whatever
he touches, becomes radiant with his Christ-life as the world is
radiant with its maker’s life; and that his natural love, that which
is irresistibly sweet to him, which rises in his blood as the spring
rises in the sap of the trees, is actually that love in which he can
attain to the fullness of life, the wholeness of joy, the completeness
of human destiny.

That is the miracle of heaven on earth, that the love of God men

THE MEASURE OF Joy 203

give to one another is hidden—but hardly hidden—in ordinary,
common things. It is the bread on the table, the touch of water,
the smell of the newly cut lemon, the grain in the wood, the taste
of wine and food: the flowers in the garden, the flame in the lamp,
the roof and the walls of the home. And it is in fact, invisibly as
well as visibly, sustenance, purification, beauty, and security.

And men give this love to one another through their ordinary
human relationships and the ordinary means by which everyone
communicates what is in his mind or his heart to another, by his
words and his silences, by his labours and his rest, by his caresses
or the withholding of his caresses, by his sympathy and by his
delight in the one he loves.

He gives himself, and in himself Christ, to others, quite literally
with his own hands, just as Christ did on earth himself, when he
took the bread into his holy hands and gave his Body and Blood
in it, to be the life of men.

And the worker becomes the maker, whether he makes some-
thing concrete with his hands, or something abstract with his
thought, or if he simply makes his home from what he earns in his
office. When the maker lives in man, all that he makes is beautiful
with his life, and ultimately the cities that he builds are beautiful,
because they are no longer labyrinths or tombs, prisons and facto-
ries in which men are machines and slaves, but instead they are
the expression of what is in the human heart. ;

In the mystery of man’s thought, his likeness to God is manifest,
and man the thinker is inseparable from man the maker; what he
makes is the thought that is in him, it is the word of his love, “the
Word made flesh.”

Man thinks of the woman he loves and his thought becomes the
things that are in his home: the tables and chairs, the bed, the
wooden porringer for the child, the thick thatch and the mown
lawn—into the making of these things the life of the maker flows.

‘The woman sews a dress for her child, or mends the man’s
shirt, she kneads and bakes the bread for the family, and her own
life goes into the old patched garment, the little dress and the loaf.

Man thinks of God, and the Cathedral of Chartres grows up
from under the ground and ascends to heaven.

204 GUILT

The Law of natural life is a musical law; the natural environ-
ment in which man lives, the universe, the stars that encircle him,
his own world, move perpetually in rhythmic cycles of life, birth,
death and resurrection, to the beat of a hymn that has no sound.
The pure majesty of that hymn swells in his own heart, it is in the
beat of his pulses and the ebb and flow of his blood. Even his
spirit must move on this rhythm if he is to be a whole man.

This natural law is a symbol of God’s law, and man needs to
give expression to it in his earthly life, and in that expression to
become continually conscious of the oneness of his soul and body,
by setting the pace of his own tiny living to the measure of the
life that is the source of all living.

His need is answered in the liturgy and ritual of the Church.

Man cannot live only in spiritual terms, for he is matter too.
If the realities of invisible Order, and the movement of the power
of divine Love are to be brought into his consciousness and made
to take hold of him, as they must be for his integrity, they must
be expressed consciously in the whole of his nature.

The movement of the universe must be seen in his movements,
he must clothe himself in the colours of light, he must hear the
soundless hymn in his own voice. He must give a voice and a
will to the world of animals and inanimate nature. He must give
a voice to all that is dumb and inarticulate in the heart of man.

He must make a pageant of the life of Christ, which under all
the ugliness of sin is the procession that is moving through his
life, and show its hidden beauty in symbols; he must bring in
lights and flowers to his altars, to show visibly the light that shines
in the darkness of his soul and the life that is ready to break into
flower under his hard crust.

Therefore God has given him the Church and its ritual, that
the invisible world may be visible to him, the intangible tangible,
the soundless music audible.

The prayers of the Church are the agelong poetry of mankind,
lifted above the perfection of poetry, for they are the prayer of
Christ on earth. That is what the ritual means, with its ordered
movements, its wide encircling gestures of love, its kiss of peace,
its extended arms of sacrifice.

THE MEASURE OF JOY 205

Every step in the sanctuary is counted, every pace measured.
The vestments clothe man’s emotions in the colours of mourning
and of joy, of the blood of the Lamb, and the snow of Tabor.

The liturgical year moves through seasons of Christ-life as the
natural year moves through seasons of natural life. It imposes a
sweetness of order upon the human heart, measuring its sorrow
and its joy, its waking and its sleep. It prevents man from being
swamped and carried away by the excess of his emotions, and yet
it carries him forward into an immensity of energy infinitely
greater than his own.

It has its winter, its season of Advent, when the seed sleeps in
the virgin Mother, and man knows by faith that he too holds the
seed hidden within him, but without any sign or hint of the
coming sweetness of spring.

Christmas comes. This is the time of newness, and if man has
grown jaded, or if his first awareness of the sheer loveliness of
life has become blunted, now is the time when he will be made
new.

The cycle moves on to Lent. Man must go into the wilderness
now and come face to face with the shadow. The time of austerity
and fasting has come, the time for the lover to turn his face
steadfastly towards Jerusalem, to know love, not only as the
fire of spring and the music of flutes, but as the strength of the
rock below the grass and the silence in the tomb hewn out of the
rock.

We come now to the season of the Passion and the Crucifixion,
and in it the pattern of love in which man’s completeness is
realized is spread out before us. Christ’s love is shown to us in
its naked realism.

On Calvary we are offered the seamless garment shaped to
Christ’s humanity, and warm with his body. But before we can
put it on we must be stripped, we must be stripped of our delu-
sions, of our fancy dress, of our wishful fantasies. We must be
stripped naked as Christ is on the cross.

In all his loves man longs for union with what he loves, and
above all in the love which is his commonest natural sanctification,
the love between man and woman. But it is this expression of love

206 GUILT

which has been made most difficult of all by guilt; it has been
split, and sex has literally become schizophrenic. Now it contains
elements of conflict, hostility, sometimes even hatred. Many
people declare quite casually that it is nothing more than a tension
brought about by a conflict of sadism and masochism, and a fre-
quent type of murder, which often happens where love is said to
bé present, is officially known as “sex murder.”

Even among married people, in the measure in which self-love
dominates one or both, they will be swamped by violence or lust,
or frustrated by impotence, and their physical unity will sever
their souls. Complicated by conflicting emotions, which after all
are inseparable from disintegrated individuals, the very act of
union in love has come to demand a life-giving, that is also an
emptying of life, a spending of self that is a little death. It has an
inescapable element of sacrifice. But to this the love of Christ on
the Cross is the glorious answer. For Christ-love is inseparable
from sacrifice, inseparable from the consummation of death and
from resurrection.

Just as the condition of natural life is the balance of light and
darkness, of movement and rest, of winter and summer, of birth
and death, death and resurrection, the condition of psychological
life is the reconciliation of opposites. Guilt must be reconciled
with innocence, the shadow with the light. Since sin has made
suffering part of all human experience, and man was created for
happiness, joy must be reconciled with grief in him, and pain
with pleasure.

The only principle which can bring about this reconciliation in
human love is redemption. The unifying principle of redemption
is nothing else but Christ’s love. In Christ on the cross the op-
posites meet and are reconciled. Guilt becomes inseparable from
innocence, suffering from joy. It is necessary to find a new name
for these two fused into one, and the only descriptive name is
redeeming love. Even life and death became one, when the Lord
of life bowed his head and died, when the seed of his blood was
sown in the dust and the whole world was pregnant with God. In
the consummation of Christ’s love on the cross, all love was con-
summated. The loves of all men in all time converged, flowing

ee

LroroLtp AND LOEB

THE MEASURE OF JOY 207

backwards and forward to that single timeless point of consum-
mation.

Because all love is consummated in him, no one who lives in
him can love and not be fulfilled by loving. There are passionate
loves which it seems must be torn out of the human heart, there
are loves which seem to be barren and empty, there are those
which seem to be fruitful only in sorrow, but all this is only
seeming, for no one can love with Christ’s love without consum-
mation. Christ has consummated all our loves.

In the passion of gentleness of the arms nailed back on the
cross was all the restraint, all the tenderness and forbearance, of
all the love of the ages of mankind. In every human love the
drama of the crucifixion is repeated, every surrender to love is a
dying to self, every dying to self is a resurrection. The same pat-
tern of love, the death and resurrection of Christ, is evident in all
manifestations of human love. Love between man and woman is
a little mystical death, and man wakes from the deep sleep of
that death a new man: his awareness of the morning is the aware-
ness of first love.

When a man has joined his own will with Christ’s and sur-
rendered it to the Father's will, his life is no longer frustrated by
his withdrawal from suffering, he has accepted all human suf-
fering; he is no longer crippled by anxiety, for the labours he
must undertake, the sorrows he must accept are all means -by
which he will transmit life; the suffering of the world is integrated
into his joy, he lives now in the life of love that has overcome
death, and in communion with the whole world.

Jesus said, Wouldst thou love one who never died

For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee?

And if God dieth not for man and giveth not himself

Eternally for man, man could not exist, for man is love

As God is love: every kindness to another is a little death

In the Divine Image, nor can men exist except by brotherhood.®

Man’s risen life in Christ is the season of the ripe fruit, the time
of the breaking of bread and the oneness of all men in the bread

* William Blake.

208 GUILT

that is broken, the time too of Christ’s joy in his Father, of his
Ascension into Heaven and the descent of the Holy Ghost. Should
man forget this, the season of Pentecost in the Church will bring
it to his mind, and with it yet more realization of the fullness of
the life in which he himself is resurrection.

The risen life is a sacramental life, and it is part of the design
of God’s love, that through the sacramental life men shall know
their communion with one another not only as they do know it
invisibly by faith, but in action. Some men, cutting themselves off
from the blessedness of the sacramental life, say they go “straight
to God,” but God comes to man in man’s hands, at man’s bidding,
and in the sacraments as well as in the transmitting of sacramental
life through human love, he ordains that men shall give him to
one another and shall come closer to one another in compassion in
the giving. Thus no man is meant to be wholly alone in any crisis
of his life, no man however outcast to die without another man
seeking him out and coming to him with Christ in his hands.

In our sacramental life with God, we are to give one another
our voices, to carry one another in our arms, to take one another’s
place before God, to give Christ to one another and to be Christ
for one another.

The sinner hears God’s forgiveness in a man’s voice, the helpless
infant does not have to wait for Christ’s life in his soul until he
can go “straight to God” by his own intellectual act, or even on
his own feet; he is carried to the living water in his godparents’
arms, and they stand before God holding the flame of his Faith
in their own souls for him, giving him their voice for his first
demand for life, while the priest pours the water over his head.
Wherever man goes, the priest follows him with the living bread:
he follows him to the battlefield, to the depths of the sea, to the
hospitals and the workhouses and the prisons; there is no outcast
who is not followed by the man who carries Christ in his hands;
that man walks in the footsteps of the outcast even to the con-
demned cell, even to the scaffold. And when man is as helpless to
help himself in death as he was in infancy, once more another
man’s voice speaks for him, another man kneels for him before
God and makes his last act of contrition.

aa a it ea cesta cence Sala emma th

THE MEASURE OF JOY 209

Thus through the sacraments God brings the communion of
men and the interchange of his life down to the simplest ele-
mentary terms of realism, which is to be the pattern of all our
human relationships, and in giving himself to us, he gives us to
one another.

Christ first gave himself to us in the hands of his virgin Mother,
and so gave her to us, the one being who is the shadowless radi-
ance of God, but wholly and only human, to be with us in every
joy and sorrow of our lives, the comfort and human tenderness
that our weakness needs.

In his Christhood, restored to God, man’s love integrates him
through an ever-growing mystery of joy—the joy of knowing his
own life to be the experience of the joy of God:

Looking upon the face of his child, feeding and clothing it,
laying it down to sleep, waking it in the morning, man knows the
eternal Fatherhood of God for his children; he knows it in his
own heart.

Making the things that are conceived in his mind, out of wood
or stone, or words or sounds, man knows the delight of the
Creator of the world, who is the maker of all things; he knows it
in his own mind.

But the joy of the saint transcends that of all other men. In-
evitably, he is as his divine Lord was, a man of sorrows. But the
joy of all other men, and the glory of all other loves, is as pale as
the flame of a candle in the sunlight, beside the joy of the saint
on earth. For his life is the experience in his own soul of the
unutterable bliss of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
in their knowing and loving one another.

When Christ bowed his head and slept the sleep of consum-
mated love, deep in the black bowl of the darkest night arose the
morning star. And when he came forth out of the tomb to the
splendour of his risen life, Christ came forth to ascend to his
Father; the dawn of everlasting day had come silently upon earth,
the spring of immortal life had put forth its fower unnoticed. The

shame and sorrow of Christ with the guilt of the whole world:

upon him had been seen by the eyes of the world, but the ex-
quisite secret of the first breath of his risen life was kept. He went

210 GUILT

up to his Father and sent the Paraclete to flood the heart of man
with his risen life.

When the saint wakens from that dark night of love in which
self has died, he too comes forth, he too knows the wonder of the
Trinity in himself. Christ has risen in him, Christ is formed in him,
the Holy Spirit descends upon him and his life is the breath of the
Spirit of love.

Sanctity is man’s integrity, the fullness and the wholeness of
his humanity; in it suffering and joy are one thing, love; and love
is Christ.

The four great arms of the cross do not only reach outwards,
pointing to the four corners of the universe; they do not only
_ reach up beyond the stars into heaven, and down into the tangled
roots under the earth; they do not only fling wide the great arms
that embrace the width of the world; they also point inwards, lead
inwards, meet, converge and become one at the centre of the
eternal mystery of consummated love, the heart of Jesus Christ.

PART FOUR

Illustrations

IRMA GRESE

InmaA GRESE was just twenty-one years old when she was put to
death for murder committed in concentration camps where she
acted as a supervisor. She is an illustration of the effect that group
membership can have—and, as we have seen all too often in late
years, frequently does have—on those who have not faced the
brutal part of their own nature.

What is known of Irma Grese is what was told at her trial by
witnesses of her cruelty, and by her sister concerning her child-
hood. She was, her sister said, a very gentle, timid child and
adolescent, quite unable to stand up for herself or to hold her own
with anyone. She was extremely afraid of her father, who was
severe with his children and who forbade Irma to carry out her
one great wish, namely to join a Nazi youth movement. But Irma
would not give up the idea, perhaps she could not. She may have
felt her insufficiency too much to preserve her rather negative
individuality alone. However, it was not until she was working
well away from home, and out of her father’s reach, that she
dared to carry out her plan.

Until that time she remained the mild, timid child described
by her sister, but soon after she had joined the German girls’
youth movement, she changed—or rather, did not change, but
revealed the brutal side of her nature. With the moral support of
numbers, the sense of power in their solidarity and the approval
of what had become public opinion for her, it required only the
provocation of the insurmountable problem of the appallingly
overcrowded camp, where hundreds of thousands of people who
were starving were put under the control of such girls as Irma, for
the brute in her to possess and dominate her.

At her trial Irma Grese showed no emotion, but only the ap-

218

214 GUILT

parent rather sullen indifference that is often shown by those
who set little value upon life, and have no sense of guilt. The most
common characteristic of the forty-five prisoners who were tried
with Irma was indifference. They seemed for the most part to
have no particular desire to ill-treat their victims in the concentra-
tion camps, but not the very faintest qualm about inflicting
devilish torments on them in carrying out orders.

Kramer, who was camp commandant at Belsen, and who is
known as the “Beast of Belsen,” was not even fanatically devoted
to Hitler and the Nazi doctrine; he took a job in the concentration
camp service in 1932 because he was out of work, and he was
promoted to his final position because he was utterly unconcerned
about anything whatever that he was ordered to do. He was per-
fectly willing to carry out any order however shocking, and
extremely efficient in doing so, but he took no personal pleasure
in the suffering he inflicted, and no interest in it. This in slightly
varying degrees was the attitude of many others, though most of
them were more indoctrinated with Nazism, and justified them-
selves by the pleas of obedience with more show of feeling for
“the Party.”

Irma Grese, young though she was, gentle and timid, as her
sister declared her to be, stood out as being one of the few
prisoners at the trial who delighted in cruelty and went out of her
way to add to the already insupportable agonies of her victims.

She was an overseer and, therefore, allotted duties to others; at
the age of nineteen she was in charge of a compound of 18,000
women. She was in charge of despatching the camp prisoners to
the gas chambers and did so, sending thousands to that ghastly
death, with unmistakable relish. She also beat prisoners already
dying from starvation and exhaustion, murdered some of them
herself, and invented refinements of cruelty, even in the midst of
such cruelty, to add to their exasperation and torment.

I quote a witness at the trial to give some idea of one of these.
The witness was a Hungarian, Helena Kopper—not a Jewess, but
arrested because she was suspected of anti-German sympathies
and an anti-German pamphlet was found in her possession. She

IRMA GRESE 215

described what happened in a punishment company of which
Irma Grese was in charge in Auschwitz:

“I was also in the punishment company and, during the time
that Grese was in charge when working outside, we were em-
ployed outside the camp in a sandpit. There were 700-800 women
working in this company; some of them were detailed to dig sand
and fill iron trucks with the sand, and others had to push these
trucks along a narrow gauge railway. The place in which we
worked was surrounded by a strand of wire about three to four
feet high and we were not allowed to go outside this wire
boundary. There were twelve guards placed at intervals around
the wire. It was the practice of Grese to pick out certain Jewish
women prisoners and order them to get something from the other
side of the wire. She always worked with interpreters. When the
prisoners approached the wire they were challenged by the
guards, but as Grese usually picked out non-Germans, they did not
understand the order and walked on and were shot. Some even of
the prisoners who did understand German and knew it was death
to cross the wire, did so because they were too weary and ill to
bother. Occasionally a guard would not shoot but would force the
prisoner to return to the working party. .. . Whilst Grese was in
charge of the working party she always carried a rubber
truncheon. She was responsible for at least thirty deaths a day,
resulting from her orders to cross the wire, but many more on
occasions.”

Another witness, Klara Lebowitz, a Czech, told the following
story:

“S.S. woman Grese was in charge of the Appelle which took
place twice a day. These lasted at least two hours, and more often
three or four hours. If a mistake was made in counting the in-
ternees they were made to stand until the missing one was found,
this often meant all day. No time was allowed for food and people
used to fall unconscious as a result of this. When the woman Grese
attended these Appelles she often made the internees go on their
knees for hours on end or hold stones in their hands high above
their heads. If an internee did not stand upright, because she was

216 GUILT

weak or for any other reason, she would beat her with a rubber
truncheon, sometimes until she was unconscious. She would kick
persons lying on the ground, and many people were taken to
hospital as the result of her treatment. The internees were not
allowed to carry anything in their pockets, and the woman Grese
would often stop and search internees whom she would
beat unmercifully if she found anything on them, even a handker-
chief.

“I have often seen the woman Grese with Dr. Mengels selecting
people for the gas chamber and for forced work in Germany. If
the woman Grese saw a mother and daughter or sisters trying to
get together in selections for forced work in Germany, she would
beat them until they were unconscious and leave them lying on
' the ground.”

These are only two out of many witnesses to the incredible
cruelty of this girl, of whom her sister said in evidence: “In our
schooldays when, as it sometimes happens, girls were quarrelling
and fighting, my sister had never the courage to fight, on the con-
trary she ran away.”

At first Irma Grese flatly denied everything that she was ac-
cused of. Afterwards she made three statements, admitting more
of her crimes in each one, and admitting some share in the guilt:

“Himmler is responsible for all that has happened, but I suppose
I have as much guilt as all the others above me.” [She was quoting
her own statement to an English officer, and went on to explain],
“I meant by this that simply by being in the S.S. and seeing the
crimes committed on order from those in authority and doing
nothing to protest or stop them being committed makes anybody
in the S.S. as guilty as anybody else. The crimes I refer to are the
gassing of persons at Auschwitz and the killing of thousands at
Belsen by starvation and untended disease. I consider the crime
to be murder.”

In a later statement she said: “I have now confessed to all the
ill-treatment of prisoners of which I was guilty because it has
been on my conscience. I have nothing else to admit.”

She did, however, admit yet more cruelty in another statement
made after that one.

IRMA GRESE 217

Irma Grese received her sentence of death without showing any
emotion of any kind, apparently quite unmoved.

Perhaps the most disturbing fact about her and those who were
tried with her is that they were all found to be perfectly sane by
the doctors and psychiatrists who examined them exhaustively;
and still more disturbing, they were not exceptional people.

There were camps similar to Auschwitz and Belsen all over
Germany in which the same kind of cruelty was practised and
taken for granted. In Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Buchenwald,
Majdanek, Dachau and Ravensbriick, and many others, it went
on daily, practised not by one or two people, but literally by
thousands of normal men and women, who had surrendered their
consciences to totalitarianism.

LEOPOLD AND LOEB

My INTENTION in using Loeb and Leopold was to illustrate the
curious type of egoism which enables certain people to stand on
trial for their lives without fear or remorse, but on the contrary
boasting, swaggering and enjoying the limelight—but I need not
say that they illustrate many other peculiarities of the guilt
complex too. In fact psychologists continually attribute new and
different ones to them, and probably the reader will find yet more
himself, if he studies them further.

Their childhood, heredity and background, as well as all their
pathological symptoms, were described in the greatest detail at
their trial, which was the first trial in the history of the American
courts in which the court allowed and encouraged a searching
medical examination of the prisoners’ minds. This was done at the
instigation of Clarence Darrow, the defending counsel, who
realized that his only hope of getting the boys sentenced to life
imprisonment, instead of to death, was to plead guilty but men-
tally ill.

Both boys were the children of very rich, and so far as money
was concerned, over-indulgent parents. Both were brilliant intel-
lectually and precocious, both brought up by governesses until
they were adolescent. Loeb’s governess, though devoted, was
extremely severe, and to avoid being punished by her he became
a confirmed liar; he also began to practise crime while still a child.
He took to stealing money and shoplifting—quite unnecessarily,
as he was allowed anything whatever that he wanted; very early
in his youth he took to stealing liquor and cars and to firing shacks.
Dr. David Abrahamsen gives an interesting analysis of him in
his book Crime and the Human Mind, in which he suggests that
he had suicidal tendencies brought about by hidden feelings of

218

~~

LEOPOLD AND LOEB 219

guilt and was driven to crime in search of self-punishment, and
that the same hidden motive caused him to commit the murder,
for which he expected to be put to death. He admitted to having
frequently thought of suicide, and his childhood and adolescent
fantasy was that he was in jail and the greatest criminal in society.

His egoism was enormous and led him, or at least was among
the things that led him, to plan what he boasted would be “the
perfect crime.” To be a master criminal became his ruling ambi-
tion. He was extremely callous and seemed incapable of feeling;
he was aware only of himself. He was a handsome boy, with great
charm of manner, and particularly he gave the impression of being
honest and open, incapable of deceit—a lovable personality!

And undoubtedly Leopold, who met him when they were both
around twelve or thirteen years old, did love him—in fact, fell in
love with him. He became completely obsessed by him, and &t-
tributed his part in the murder to the fact that he could not refuse
to do anything which Loeb wanted. Speaking of Loeb he said,
“I am jealous of the food and drink that he takes because I
cannot come as close to him as the food and drink.”

Loeb found Leopold a perfect tool to carry out his crime
dreams with, and he himself was the realization of the other boy’s
childhood fantasy, which was that he was a devoted slave. The
two boys, now about fourteen years old, made a crime friendship
pact in which it was an agreed condition that Leopold was to be
completely dominated by Loeb, and when the latter used the
phrase “for Robert’s sake” he was to give way to his wishes, what-
ever they were, without any question.

Leopold had a number of physical complaints, chiefly glandu-
lar, and was undersized and unattractive; he was very conscious
of this and of his unpopularity, owing mainly to his precocity. He
had already been vitiated by the unnatural eroticism of one of his
governesses, who during the few years she had charge of him
succeeded in making normal sexual life in future extremely dif-
ficult for him. Before this incident of the governess, he had wor-
shipped his mother, and when she died, though he was still a
young child, he turned savagely against God and religion.

In May 1924, when Leopold was’ nineteen and Loeb was

220 GUILT

eighteen, they committed the murder which they had been dream-
ing of and planning for years. They enticed a much younger boy,
Robert Frank, into their car and hit him over the head with a
heavy instrument. At the actual moment of the murder Leopold
was frightened; Loeb, on the other hand, was indifferent and
amused, Later they put the boy’s body into a drain and claimed
ransom for him.

When the boys were arrested they at first denied the crime
but afterwards confessed it, and were brought to trial. They came
into court carefully and elegantly dressed and appeared to enjoy
the publicity extremely. Loeb, answering a reporter who re-

marked on his careful tailoring and hair cut, replied, “Of course,
this is our show: the public must not be cheated.”

They smiled, joked quietly and took notes, and were concerned
with one thing only, the effect they were making and their pub-
licity. They were gratified by seeing their photographs in the
paper, and showed no aversion to the jail after their luxurious
homes.

On one day of the trial alone did they show any emotion, then
they seemed to be swayed, like the crowd in the courtroom, by
the intensely emotional pleading of their counsel. After their
sentence to life imprisonment was passed, they went to serve it
with apparent pleasure.

The case is given in detail in Clarence Darrow for the Defense,
by Irving Stone, who ends his description by saying: “Within a
few minutes Loeb and Leopold were on their way to Joliet, Loeb
to be cut to death after a few years by a fellow prisoner, Leopold
to establish a brilliant educational system for incarcerated men.”*®

* (New York: Doubleday, 1941).

JOHN GEORGE HAIGH

Ir 1s NOT suRPRIsING that those who make a habit of murder need
to hide their true character from themselves, as much as they
need to hide it from other people. This may also explain why it
is that men who murder women with almost habitual frequency
usually become attached, in so far as they are capable of doing
so, to one woman, who is quite safe with them. For few men can
believe in their real selves without the continual flattering reas-
surance of one woman’s love and admiration, and still less can
they believe in their pseudo-selves without it.

Thus the famous Smith who murdered three wives by drown-
ing them in the bath, and who had an astonishing record of
sordid crime and fraud besides, had one woman in his life whom
he did not marry, did not murder, and always came back to.

Haigh, the acid bath murderer who has so recently perished,
was deeply loved by one young woman, whom he treated with
respect and apparently with affection; and since she was necessary
for his self-love, it is very likely that in so far as he could love,
he loved her.

For her, and for everyone, and especially for himself, he
adopted the fancy-dress of a gentleman, or at all events of his
conception of a gentleman, which would be a dapper kind of
man, with a smart car, and a certain amount of swagger—some-
thing, in fact, more like most people’s conception of a bounder.
Haigh combined this gentleman with the conceit of cleverness.

While awaiting his trial for murder, he boasted continually to
two other men imprisoned with him, and reiterated again and
again to them, that he would get off because of his cleverness but
that they, who were also awaiting trial for murder, would be con-
demned to death, because they were not clever, as he was. But
before he was tried he adopted an air of patronising benevolence

221

222 GUILT

to his warders, and was generous to them with offers of cigarettes,
newspapers and so on.

After his trial, when he was in the condemned cell, it became
more necessary than ever for him to put on disguise, the disguise
of his conception of a gentleman. His conceit and his boast of
cleverness could not save him now, even from self-knowledge, but
his fear of self-knowledge, and the degree of shame hidden by his
seeming lack of it, can be measured by the extent of his pose as a
gentleman.

Of course in prison clothes, which until the morning of his
execution a condemned man must wear, and without a car or
money, he was obliged to fall back on the old trick of trying to
lift himself by taking others down. He adopted an attitude of
superiority to his warders, treating them as if they were his ser-
vants, and making continual complaints about them, and indeed
about everything else.

It is difficult to imagine a greater strain or a more unpleasant
task than to be a warder guarding a man who is to die. Means,
though one can hardly imagine their being adequate, are pro-
vided—such as games, cards, chess, and so on—with which the
poor warder may try to distract the prisoner, but Haigh con-
sidered it beneath his status to play with the warders and refused
to do so.

At his trial Haigh’s “cleverness” consisted in pretending mad-
ness, a type of religious mania, linked up with the alleged excess
of religion in his early upbringing. This was sheer fake. He had
learnt the symptoms of the insanity he pretended to, from another
prisoner, who really had been in the criminal lunatic asylum at
Broadmoor, but it is not easy to learn insanity from an insane
person, who will know about it only subjectively and will not
know anything about the several hundred symptoms that a mental
nurse will note daily. Certainly Haigh no longer had any strong
religious feeling, even if he had as a boy, but during the night
before his execution he wrote a letter saying that liberty of reli-
gious thought is not tolerated in England, as he was to be exe-
cuted for heresy! And to this strange statement he added, “I go
forward to finish my mission in another form.”

JOHN GEORGE HAIGH 223

He dressed himself on the morning of his death, as he was then
allowed to do, in the new suit which he had bought to wear
during his trial—maintaining his fancy dress to the end.

The Church of England clergyman came to do what he could
to prepare him to die; he came at six o'clock, thinking that this
poor man might want some comfort, but Haigh sent him away
until half-past seven, and gave scant attention to his soul.

Perhaps because this, too, would have compelled him at last
to take off his fancy dress and face himself.

PETER KURTEN

PereR KiRTen is one of the most baffling murderers that ever
lived. My object is to use his case to illustrate that particularly
dangerous type of criminal—dangerous especially to women—
who seems to be almost too gentle, too eager to please, and who
is capable of almost unbelievable brutality in committing crime
—a type often produced by violent and brutal fathers, who, while
crushing their children to a state of servility, breed in them a
haired of authority represented in their own person, which is
likely to find its outlet in crimes of a violence that can be matched
against the father’s violence.

Power, as these wretched children have seen it, must be exerted
by brutal means. They thirst to be revenged on authority, to get
power over it; and they know no other way. But fear makes them
outwardly gentle, eager to placate: the revenge they plan is one
that must be taken in secret, under cover of darkness. The attempt
to attack a man of the father’s strength is not to be thought of, and
the only way out is to identify Self with the Father and attack a
child.

In some cases this identification, mixed up, as it always is,
inextricably with the Father-Son complex, may be a hidden means
of bringing the Father, in the person of oneself, to the gallows.
Such a motive is not out of the question in Kiirten’s case, for
among his peculiarities was a mania for confessing; we shall see
that few people ever confessed so often, in so many ways, and so
willingly. Moreover, he did bring himself to the guillotine. It
was he himself who persuaded his own wife to give him up to
the police, and who gave her the evidence that must Jead to his
death. Such is the rough outline of the theory I am attempting to
illustrate by Peter Kiirten, but almost any other theory about

224

PETER KURTEN 225

crime could be illustrated by him too—or, I was going to say,
about insanity, but he was found to be perfectly sane by the
doctors at his trial, and he had no symptoms of insanity.

He claimed to be a sadist, and though sadism is not regarded
as insanity in English Law, many people consider it to be so in
fact. However, a genuine sadist would not be capable of stopping
in the middle of his criminal act if he heard someone coming, but
Kiirten could do that, and several times he did so. Also, a maniac
of any kind who commits a crime during an attack of mania has
no clear remembrance of anything immediately before the crime;
his mind is confused and overcharged at that time, and has either
a hopelessly confused memory of it, or none at all. Kiirten had
vivid and detailed memories of these moments, and not only of
those preceding his more recent crimes, but of those committed
years ago. He was able to describe in detail the bedroom, with the
furniture and how it was arranged, where he murdered a little
girl many years before, although this was the only occasion on
which he had ever been into that room. He described both the
outward circumstance of the crimes he confessed and his own
reactions and sensations: these of course could not be proved, but
the others, such as the little girl’s bedroom, could be verified, and
in every case they were.

Not only were there these signs of sanity confirmed by medical -

examination, but Kiirten, considering his low birth and lack of
education, had educated himself and acquired considerable cul-
ture of a sort, by reading. He attributed some of his obsession
with crime, and his rather fatalistic attitude to it in his own case,
to his reading of Lombroso’s works on the Criminal Man, and
especially to his theory of moral insanity.

He certainly knew and said that he knew the difference be-
tween right and wrong, and expressed shame and contrition,
sympathy for the relations of his victims, and the assurance of his
prayers for them. But he also declared that he confessed his hor-
tible crimes, many of which would not otherwise have been
known, because doing so gave him a feeling of greatness.

This particular inconsistency seems to me to bear out the theory
of identification with the Brutal Father, which would have com-

226

pensated for his littleness and weakness, and so account for the
feeling of being grand and great, whilst the shame and sorrow
would be the reactions of the gentle, childish side of his nature.
Apart from crimes for which he had already been imprisoned
at the time of his trial—mostly theft, threats and acts of brutality

—Kiirten has the following crimes to his credit:

Attempted strangling: Twenty-three, between the years 1899

and 1930.

November 1899 an unknown girl of eighteen

1913

1921
1925

1926
1927
1929

1930

Margaret Schafer

an unknown woman
Gertrude Franken

A war widow

Tiedmann (young woman)
Mech (young woman)
Kiefer (young woman)
Wack (young woman)
“Anni” (young girl)

Edith Boukorn

Maria Witt

Maria Mass

unknown girl

Christine Heerstrasse (also thrown in river)
Maria Rad

unknown girl
Hau (young woman)
Maria Biidlick

Strangling: Between the same years—eight

1918

Christine Klein (her throat was also cut)

PETER KURTEN 227

1929

Rose Ohliger (a child, also stabbed after death)
Maria Hahn (also stabbed to death)

Anni (also drowned)

Gertrude Hamacher (child, also throat cut)

Luise Lenzen (child, also stabbed)

Gertrude Schulte (also stabbed)

Gertrude Albermann (also stabbed with scissors )

Stabbing: Between 1929 and 1980—five

Rudolf Scheer (man)

Anna Goldhausen

Frau Mantel

Gustav Kornblum (man)
Gertrude Schulte (young woman)

Attacks with axe, hammer or scissors: Approximately twelve

1913

1929

1930

unknown man (axe)

unknown woman (axe)

Frau Kiihn (scissors)

Sofie Riickl (blow with a tool)
Frau Meurer (hammer)

Frau Wanders (hammer)
several girls

Charlotte Ulrich

Gertrude Bell

Killed with hammer blows in 1929

Ida Reuter (young woman)
Elizabeth Dérrier (young woman)

These figures add up roughly to thirty-five attempted murders,
and ten murders. Besides these there were forty cases of arson.
All these are crimes to which Kiirten confessed voluntarily. At

his trial the cases of arson were omitted and he was charged with
nine murders.

228 GUILT

At his trial he confessed all these murders and his attempted
murders in great detail. He had already confessed them to the
doctors who examined him before the trial, and before that he
had twice confessed to his wife, all the murders that he committed
in Disseldorf, begging her, the second time, to give him up to
the police. But not content with this, he also confessed to two
murders of which he was innocent. These murders were com-
mitted by a man named Brink in Altenburg.

Further details about Kiirten’s confessions to his wife can best
be told in the place in which they occur in his own account of his
life. For in his confessions and statements in court and in those
made to his doctors in prison, Kiirten left a more detailed, clear
and remarkable autobiography of a murderer than any that has
ever been recorded in the history of crime.

I shall attempt to put his confessions, and some proved state-
ments, together in such a way as to make a consecutive picture
of his life, and leave the reader to consider for himself whether
he was mad or sane, a sadist or not, a megalomaniac or someone
suffering from appalling inferiority: or whether he was simply a
sinner who surrendered to his own evil impulses. And finally,
whether or not there are any reasonable grounds for my theory of
the Father-Son complex. But first of all a brief description of
Kiirten’s personality as it appeared to those who knew him.

On the days following his arrest in Diisseldorf, the people of
the town absolutely and unanimously refused to believe that he
was “the Monster.” They knew him as a respectable middle-aged
man of great charm—hardworking whenever he had the opportu-
nity to work, and devoted to his wife, though it was also common
gossip that he was unfaithful to her. This, however, seemed to
the gossips, especially the women, to be explained by his extraor-
dinary charm and gentleness, which few women could resist,
and by his wife’s being, though a good woman, prematurely old,
which would hardly be likely to hold a man to whom life offered
so many temptations. It was his wife who refused to let his infidel-
ities break up the marriage, although she resented them. She had
a reason for this, apart from a really deep affection for him. In
her past she had shot and killed a man who had betrayed her.

5 Ee eR eee

i
fi

PETER KURTEN 929

- For that she had served a prison sentence, but she considered it

just that she should serve a life-long sentence of patience and
abnegation with her husband. She worked in a restaurant on night
shifts, and because, when the series of murders started to terrify
Diisseldorf, she felt nervous about walking through the streets,
Peter called at the restaurant to take her home in the small hours
of the morning—an arrangement which fitted in very well with
his other plans, thought it was unnecessary, for Frau Kiirten
happened to be the only woman in Diisseldorf who was safe.

She was safe because she was the one woman for whom Kiirten
had some kind of love and respect. She was also the only one with
whom he had perfectly normal sexual relations. He said that she
had no physical attraction for him, but he admired and respected
her and felt deep affection for her.

There was one point about which everyone, including his wife,
who knew Peter Kiirten agreed; this was his attraction for
children. They all loved him, and he gave the impression that he
loved them. He had no adult friends, but many child friends,
whom he treated tenderly.

Although to everyone else who knew him personally he was
excessively gentle, he occasionally showed violence to his wife,
if she crossed him in any way. But she, overshadowed by remorse
for her impulsive crime, accepted this as her due, and humoured
him in every way.

Now here is his own account of himself in his own words,®
though I have re-arranged the order of them slightly to give a
consecutive picture of his life.

“I was born in Miilheim-on-the-Rhine. In my early childhood
my parents moved frequently from one town to another. My father
was very often drunk. There were always quarrels with other
people living in the house. During my early years, I, as eldest
child, suffered very much from my father’s drunken brutality.
When I was eight years old I ran away from home and stayed
away for weeks. I slept in furniture pantechnicons and a police-
man caught me in one. In 1895 we moved to Diisseldorf. We were

* Quoted by Margaret Seaton Wagner in The Monster of Diisseldorf
(London: Faber and Faber, 1932).

230 GUILT

ten children and the poverty was dreadful when my father .
happened to be in prison. But if he were at home it was almost
worse because he drank away all his money. Even in those days I
was almost an outcast, and the other children at school pointed
me out to one another. I kept away from them out of my own free
will.

“When we lived in K6ln-Miihlheim we lived in the same lodging
as the dog-catcher. There used to be one in every town. Dogs
running loose were caught, and when they were not claimed they
were killed and eaten. Their fat was sold as a specific cure... .
Seeing these animals slaughtered often gave me pleasure. I often
thought of this man later on when I was old enough to catch
squirrels, martens or birds for selling in the zoological shops... .
I still have a scar on my finger where a squirrel bit me. If you
- seize them by the neck they let go. When I did this as a boy it
gave me pleasure.

“Through reading and discussing things of the kind I came to
understand that such feelings could arise. At the time there were
more pigs killed at home than today. I always enjoyed looking
on. As a schoolboy I always liked to see a fire, the screams and
agitation of the people were a delight to me.

“When I was a boy of nine I used to look after the washing
spread out by the washerwomen on the banks of the Rhine.

“We boys played about on rafts. I committed my first murder,
if you want to call it that, by pushing one of the boys into the
water and under the raft. When another boy fell in when looking
over the side for him, I did not help him but pushed him back
into the water; both were drowned. I felt very much afraid when
I saw them dead and was frightened to be alone for some time,
but after a while that feeling left me.

“When I was fourteen I became an apprentice in the same
factory in which my father worked. In the same year my father
was sentenced to a term of three years penal servitude for incest.
My sister was thirteen and a half.

“I was dependent upon the favour of other people for bread.
When my father came out again I had a very bad time. He treated
me brutally and even attacked me with a knife. I often ran away

PETER KURTEN 281

and stayed away for some time. My father used to threaten to cut
my head off and things like that. Once something of the kind was
only prevented by the screams of the other children. At last I
determined to get away altogether. I took some money I was told
to pay in. I was sent to prison. I had two days extra for spending
the night on a bench in the Hofgarten. I was handcuffed, though
a boy at the time, and taken by an enormously big policeman
through the whole town till we arrived at the prison. I was dread-
fully ashamed! Perhaps people thought I was a murderer already
at that time. But there in the police cells at Berger Gate I met
real criminals. There were hard cases newly sent up again. I got
myself tattooed there for the first time.

“After my release I was homeless. A woman twice as old as I
was took me into her home—for her own purposes. I became her
lover. Because I wanted to come in one night against the will of
the other people in the house, I got another sentence for
attempted housebreaking. I was forbidden to come again, but I
did so, sometimes creeping over the roofs of the houses. I was
a casual labourer at the time, about 1900, and got imprisoned
twice for trying to get out of paying my bill at an eating-house
and for thefts in shops. Sometimes I was home in Diisseldorf,
sometimes I got short-time jobs elsewhere. But in November I
was sentenced to two years imprisonment for renewed thefts.
When I came out again I think I was a little mad. And I did some-
thing for which even today I have no explanation.” ,

(He referred to throwing stones and firing shots into a window
to frighten a family.)

“I got a fresh sentence for that and was in prison until 1904.
I was called up as a conscript to Metz, and deserted there. I took
up with a woman who thieved with me and the result was seven
years penal servitude. That was too heavy a punishment in my
opinion: I was too young for it. I underwent this term until May
13th, 1912, and then I was flung out upon the world again. In the
autumn of 1912 I spoke to a woman in the automatic restaurant,
and when the waiter came up and interrupted I fired a shot. The
consequence was a new punishment for intent to do bodily harm.
After this I kept stealing more or less regularly, specializing

232 GUILT

chiefly in the houses where there was a public-house below and
the family lived in rooms above. In Diisseldorf when out on one
of these expeditions I came into a bedroom above the ‘Lésch-
Ecke,’ where there were several children and a young girl of about
seventeen—asleep. It was then for the first time, in a sudden rush
of feeling I can’t explain, that I fell upon this girl and tried to
strangle her. This attempt lasted some time, then I escaped unob-
served. ...

“In one particular house I was hunting around the bedroom by
the light of a pocket-lamp. In a second bedroom leading out of
it I saw a girl of about nine years old in bed. I felt suddenly
exactly as I had felt in the ‘Liésch-Ecke’—I forgot everything
_ else. I flung myself on this girl in a great state of agitation,
and strangled her, and when she was lying there quiet, took out
my sharp little pocket-knife and cut the child’s throat... . first
of all I had only the intention of stealing, but when I saw the
child, there came over me beside the other excitement the
remembrance of my terrible sufferings and humiliation during
my years of imprisonment. In those days the young prisoners
were drilled and ‘licked into shape’ in the same yards where they
play football and other games today. We were called names and
our lives made burdens. There were special punishments of star-
vation diet with full-time work. There were the dark cells as
frequent punishment. I was put into irons for a bad breach of
discipline. There were manacles with heavy chains which were
kept on night and day and rubbed sores on the body .... well,
the remembrance of these and other brutal punishments, which in
my opinion were often unjust and served out arbitrarily by
despots, combined with the strong sexual passions I have inherited
from my father, made me absolutely crazy. The first reason is the
principal factor, though I think perhaps I would not have done
it if I had not had memories of torture I had undergone to do
away with the last inhibitions.”

After this Kiirten described three of his unsuccessful attempts
to murder, ending with, “All these things gave me sexual satis-
faction,” and questioned by the judge concerning his crimes of
arson, he went on: “In 1904 when my desire for injuring people
awoke, the love of setting fire to things awoke as well. The sight

if ==

PETER KURTEN 233

of flames delighted me, but above all it was the excitement of the
attempts to extinguish the fire and the agitation of those who saw
their property being destroyed. I set light to barns chiefly.” He
added that the thought of possible human victims of the fire gave
him pleasure.

He continued to describe murder after murder and attempted
murder after attempted murder. He said that usually he followed
up a murder by a fire. Far from the display of indifference so
frequently found in murderers of this type, Peter Kurten showed
signs of distress, and mentioned that on looking back he was glad
that his long prison sentences had prevented him from committing
yet more crimes. He constantly associated his father’s brutality
with that of the prison authorities; thus, following the confession
I have just quoted, more or less, he said:

“My youth was a martyrdom. We never had a Sunday because
my father used to make us work. He had made a little workshop
for moulding aluminum utensils in the cellar. My mother was
pure and good.” [It is interesting to note here that the reason he
gave for his affection for his wife, who was some years older than
he, was that she was a good woman.] “I was witness of his brutal
treatment of my sister. In prison I began to think about revenging
myself on society. I did myself a great deal of damage through
reading blood-and-thunder stories, for instance I read the tale of
‘Jack the Ripper’ several times. When I came to think over what
I had read when I was in prison, I thought what pleasure it would
give me to do things of that kind once I got out again. I see now
that I ought to have resisted putting such thoughts into practice.
Setting fire to things gave me just as much pleasure, from the
fright and agitation of the people whose property was burning,
from the crackle of the flames and the thundering of the big
heavy horses who used to draw the fire hose. I think with relief
today that my long terms of imprisonment prevented me from
doing more harm. I was only sixteen when I found out what
pleasure it gave me to try and strangle a girl I took out with me
into the woods near Grafenberg. The woman who took me up
when I first came out of prison was one whose temperament was
the very opposite to my own. She liked cruel treatment.”

Kiirten agreed with the suggestion made at this point by the

934 GUILT

public prosecutor that this last fact increased his tendency to
sadism.

He mentioned again and again the pleasure he derived even
from the secondary excitation of his crimes. Referring to the day
following one of the most shocking of his child-murders, he said,
“There is a café opposite the Klein’s place, and I sat there and
drank a glass of beer and read all about the murder in the papers.
People were talking about it all round me. All this amount of
indignation and horror did me good.”

Referring to the two murders which he confessed but had not
really committed, he said, “The news of them made a great
impression on me but I did not do them.”

He denied that he went out to search deliberately for someone
to kill: “It is not a fact that I went out in search of somebody to
kill, no matter whom. I looked for a victim in so far as I believed
that the injury and the cries of the victim would give me the
satisfaction I wanted and relieve the sexual tension.”

Describing how after one of his cruellest murders, that of a
child, he went out to set fire to the little body, he said: “I derived
no sexual satisfaction from what I did. My motives were simply to
arouse excitement and indignation in the population. Through
setting fire to the body I thought I could increase the rage.”

_ Again, after the murder of a young woman whom he stabbed
in the heart with a pair of scissors, he relates: “Next evening I
went back to the spot and thought over where I could bury the
body. I thought how nice it would be if I had something of the
kind to sit by when I took a walk. I went back home and took a
spade with me and dug a deep hole in a woody corner of the
field. I lifted the body and laid it just as one would lay an ordinary
corpse in a grave. I took the wrist-watch off her arm—I had a
feeling of solemn tenderness all the time. I stroked her hair and
shovelled in the first spadefuls of earth very evenly and carefully.
I hid the spade in the brook and cleaned my shoes. I went to the
grave many times afterwards and kept on improving it. Later on
I must have been to the spot at least thirty times, and every time
when I thought of what was lying there I had a feeling of

satisfaction.” ,

PETER KURTEN 235

To his defending counsel Kiirten confessed privately that at ten
years old, a year after his first two murders—the two boys he
pushed into the river—he murdered another two by the same
method.

There was continual evidence in Kiirten’s own statements that
he had a mania for grandeur. He said that one of the strongest
urges in him to confess was that it gave him a feeling of grandeur,
and moreover it was a form of re-living the crimes, like day-
dreaming. He did indeed seem to be one who lived in a border-
land between daydreams and reality. In the confinement of his
long imprisonments his vivid imagination gave him the fearful
satisfaction he longed for; when he came out of prison he trans-
lated it into reality, and while awaiting trial he re-lived his crimes
in his confessions.

Yet while making those confessions he showed some remorse
in his manner, and repeatedly declared his sympathy for the
victims.

“I must insist,” he said, “that I feel deep sympathy with the
victims and particularly with the poor children.”

Perhaps the most baffling thing he ever said was this, spoken
to his father confessor in his cell. He was speaking of little
Gertrude Albermann, the child of five:

“The child was so sweet to me and put her little arms round
my neck when J lifted her up and carried her, and laid her cheek
against mine and was so trusting.”

After he was condemned to death Kiirten behaved calmly and
gave no trouble at all; he went to the guillotine willingly and
did not, as might have been expected of him, attempt any
exhibitionism. Asked if he had any last wishes, he said “No” with
no sign of emotion and no comment.

He had not been practising his religion for many years, but he
made his confession in preparation for death. This time it was a
sacramental confession, and after it he said that his obsessional
daydreams ceased entirely and did not return, This fact as well
as the others is worth pondering.

BENEDICT JOSEPH LABRE

THE story of Benedict Joseph Labre illustrates the way in which
God sometimes uses neurosis to lead a man, whose will is sur-
rendered to him, into a vocation which he would not even imagine
for himself.

How could Labre have known in 1764, when he was sixteen
years old, that he was to take the guilt of our own generation
upon himself, and to sanctify in himself the terrible suffering
which millions of men and women and even little children were
going to endure in a not far distant future? How could he have
chosen just those sufferings that would be the outcome of our
ideologies and wars, and which in Labre’s times it would hardly
have been possible to imagine as the fate of millions of people?

I mean the suffering of the millions who have died in German
concentration camps, after suffering starvation, filthiness, con-
tempt, raggedness or nakedness; and, when they were not driven
into the gas-chambers, death from exhaustion. And those who
today are in Communist prisons and camps, hidden away, out of
reach of human help; as well as the thousands known by the
dreadful description “Displaced Persons,” who, deprived of home
and country, are wandering destitute about the world.

Poverty, austerity, and a wandering life other holy men had
often chosen before him, but he went further, he was verminous,
he ate scraps from garbage heaps; he was not only without a
home but without a country, ever going from one shrine to
another, from one city to another. His clothes were rotting off
him, and in the end he died of exhaustion.

This is all too familiar a picture of human suffering now, but
how did this man, so clearly a prophet of our times, know to
choose it?

236

BENEDICT JOSEPH LABRE 237

He did not choose it. He chose only to surrender his will to God,
and even that he planned to do in quite a different way, by a life
of contemplation within the tranquillity of the cloister.

Until he was sixteen years old he was able to study success-
fully, and there seemed to be no reason why he should not carry
out his intention. But no sooner did he attempt to do so than he
was defeated by mental suffering, which certainly bears out the
idea that he was our prophet-saint, for he was led into the
amazing life God chose for him by our most widespread suffering,
neurosis. He became quite unable to concentrate on anything or
to learn anything, and in addition he became possessed by
depression so black that it was perfectly clear to the religious
superiors whom he asked to accept him, that he would never be
able to live their life of discipline and silence, and remain sane.

He made attempt after attempt to overcome this curious state
of mind, going from the Trappists to the Carthusians, from the
Carthusians to the Cistercians; but always with the same result—
failure. Usually there were reasons coupled with his seeming
mindlessness for refusing him—he was too young, or too frail; but
when he was given a trial, his depression turned to torment and
he had to be sent away.

At length he realized, through an irresistible inner compulsion,
that he was to live the life I have described: a life of drastic
austerity and penance, not hidden away, but right out in the open,
among men, literally in the streets of the cities of the world.

No sooner had Labre understood what it was that he was to
do, than his mental condition was cured. He had no idea of the
whole meaning of his life, of how many millions he stood proxy
for before God, of the enormous burden of mental suffering that
was sanctified in his own; but from the moment that he became
a wandering beggar his mind was illuminated and filled with
peace, which remained with him through all his outward suffering
until, like so many of those for whom he had come to be a Christ,
he died from exhaustion in the crowded streets.

TERESA MARTIN

It 1s IMPOSSIBLE to write a book about psychological suffering in
any form, without referring again and again to Teresa Martin.
What Benedict Labre did for the victims of the war, she did for
the victims of civilization, the neurotics of our generation—for
' the neurotics and mentally suffering people that are now in such
great majority. She sanctified that worst of all suffering in herself,
and without realizing the vast significance of what she did,
entered into it in her acceptance of her father’s mental affliction
as well as of her own suffering.

At eight years old Teresa fell ill with what was unquestionably
a neurotic illness and was baffling to the doctors of her day. The
symptoms were those often associated with the “guilt complex”;
they were entirely mental or emotional, consisting of fear and
distress that was frightening even to watch, and which nothing
could relieve. This continued for so long that the child’s life even
was considered to be in danger.

It is not surprising that she had this illness, for she was an
extremely oversensitive child, and the intensity of the piety all
round her in her home must have brought on her already pre-
cocious spirituality as the heat brings on the hot-house flowers.
She was frail in body too, and this, together with her environment,
would almost inevitably have resulted in uneven emotional
development.

There were certainly natural causes for the curious illness, but
there was also the supernatural one—that no one could better
offer the burden of psychological suffering than this really good
child; no one could sanctify the feeling of guilt better than she,
She was preparing for our generation.

Finally the illness was cured by a miracle, and the interesting

238

Courtesy of Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

FRANZ KAFKA

TERESA MARTIN 239

fact is that after it she never showed symptoms of a neurotic kind
again, although she did suffer, with amazing balance, everything
that neurotic people suffer in their minds..

She was cured of her illness, and from now on she had unusual
spiritual and mental poise, which never forsook her whatever her
pain of mind or body. But she was not cured of being herself; she
still had the same acute sensitivity to wrestle with, and she was
to know all about the suffering that ego-neurotics complain so
much of—being misunderstood and exploited. Only Teresa did
not complain.

She experienced the terrible sense of emptiness and the numb-
ness of feeling that frightens so many psychothenics, and passed
from the knowledge that she was unappreciated by people to the
feeling, which is the nearest that there is to despair, that she was
forsaken by God.

The well-known story of her torture when another nun rattled
her rosary, shows clearly enough that wonderfully though she
controlled it, she suffered from acute nervous irritability.

As if it were necessary for her formally to accept the humili-
ation of mental suffering, the opportunity to do so was given to
her in the hardest way imaginable. Her father became mentally
ill. His brain was affected by paralysis and he was unable even
to recognize his children; Teresa had seen a strange (perhaps
telepathic?) vision of him, with a kind of veil over his head and
face, which was some sort of warning to her. She suffered intensely
when this blow fell—“Words could not express my agony”—but
nevertheless she says that the three years of what she describes
as her father’s martyrdom were the most dear and fruitful years
in her life: “Our father must be greatly loved by God since he has
so much to suffer. What a delight to share in his humiliation.”

Thus the indomitable forerunner of our neurotic age accepted
not only that man’s suffering, but the mental suffering of all those

today who like him must be greatly loved by God, because they
have so much to suffer,

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

A GENIus cannot escape from his destiny of Christhood, and he
cannot attempt to resist it without disaster. Other men who resist
it tend to become mediocre, they tend towards nothingness. They
shut the door of their minds against the Holy Spirit, the wind of
Heaven, which would have swept through the house of their
spirit, bearing with it the seed of life; and they shut themselves
into an empty house. But the genius cannot shut the door of his
mind, because if he does so the Holy Spirit will sweep down upon
him and break open the doors and the walls of his house. It will
not come to him in a soft wind, but in a sea of wind in storm
breaking down everything that resists it. The genius is a channel
through which the universal experience of mankind is poured;
all human love and grief and joy, in all their forms, must pass
through him. Most men possess their own hearts, but the heart
of the genius does not belong to him, it belongs to everyone. His
function in life is to give expression to that which is secret in the
hearts of all men. He must be the voice of the world, he must
laugh with the delight of the whole world, he must shed every
man’s tears. He must understand in a unique way what it means
to bear another’s burdens. It is both his glory and his tragedy that
he does not belong to himself. He is given to mankind by God,
and he is wonderfully close in his sweet and terrible vocation to
“The Word of God.”

What has been said about guilt and the human destiny of
Christhood should have made it clear that the universal experi-
ence of mankind can only be known and lived in any one man,
through the man who abides in all mankind, Christ.

It can only be suffered, without shattering the individual, if he
puts up no resistance, but surrenders his soul to the Holy Spirit,

240

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 241

through whom he is indwelt by Christ, and from whom he receives
the fortitude, peace, joy, patience, love, wisdom and under-
standing that are the soul’s stability.

Genius admits no compromise. The human being to whom it is
given must either be a saint, surrendering absolutely to his Christ-
destiny, or be broken by his genius.

This may well be the.reason for the frequency of tragedy and
instability in the lives of great authors. Every one of those listed
below was insane, or psychopathic, neurotic, alcoholic, or ad-
dicted to drugs.

Blake Crabbe De Quincey
Beddoes Dickens Rossetti
Boswell Donne Ruskin
Bunyan Dostoievsky Rousseau
Burns Ernest Dowson Rimbaud
Byron Flaubert Rilke
Baudelaire Goethe Strindberg
Emily Bronté Gray Shelley
Elizabeth Barrett Gogol Smart

Browning Holderlin Swift
Léon Bloy Lionel Johnson De Sade
Carlyle Charles Lamb Swinburne
Chatterton Mary Lamb Tennyson
Clare D. H. Lawrence Francis Thompson
Coleridge Lermontov James Thomson
Collins Nietzsche Verlaine
Cowper Edgar Allan Poe

Many of these wrestled with their. own disaster, some overcame
it. But their real conflict was with God.

In the soul of the genius the Kingdom of Heaven suffers
violence.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against- me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes MY bruiséd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and
flee?®
The neurosis or frustrating circumstance in the life of a genius
is always a conflict between the frailty of human nature and the

© From Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Carrion Comfort” in Poems.

242 GUILT

immensity of his destiny, but it is not always a sign that he has
been broken on the rock of his destiny. Sometimes the conflict is
the means by which he must fulfill his vocation and enter into the
communion with mankind which is its fulfillment.

This was certainly the case with Hans Christian Andersen. And
what conflict he had to wrestle with, both within himself and in
every circumstance of his life. Poverty, ignorance, family madness
and instability, a drunken mother, a selfish and worthless step-
father, his own ugliness and oversensitivity, bullying and dis-
couragement from his schoolmaster, failure in love—all this and
more is the background of the fairy-stories that hold the secrets
of every human heart.

Hans Christian Andersen was born at Odense in April 1805. His
father was a cobbler; in him a poet was defeated, and he suffered
from almost pathological depression. But he was the only person
in the whole of Hans Christian’s life who was close to him both
in understanding and love. Longing to give the little boy the
education that poverty had denied to himself, the father read
aloud to him from the few books he had bought at the price of
real self-denial, made toys and puppets for him, and a puppet
theatre, and encouraged him in his fantasies and his dreams.

Hans Christian adored him, but before he was ten years old,
the father in a fit of depression enlisted as a soldier, only to return
a few months later broken in health and spirit, and within two
years, when Hans Christian was eleven, he died.

Hans Christian’s mother was a washerwoman, a devoted
mother, who now had to work harder than ever for her son, who
gave little promise of ever becoming a breadwinner himself. She
loved him dearly and was proud of him, and proud of the strange,
impractical mind which she could not understand, and of his
fastidiousness and extraordinary natural refinement. She came
from circumstances of misery herself, As a child she had been
driven out to beg in the streets by her parents. Now she kept their
one room spotless; everything there was shining and neat; her
little son, though his clothes were of the poorest, was kept shining
and neat too, but this was no easy task, for he grew at a furious
pace. He grew out of everything the poor woman made for him,

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 943

as soon as it was made; his wrists stuck out of his sleeves, his legs
grew too long for his trousers. And he not only grew bigger and
bigger, but he grew more and more grotesque and ugly, and more
and more odd: he wrote poems, and stranger still, with those
great clumsy feet and long thin legs, he wanted to be a dancer.
His hands were huge and looked clumsy too, but he made the
loveliest little puppets with them and sewed their clothes himself,
and he cut out paper silhouettes that were as decorative and
beautiful as the settings for the Russian Ballet. But his mother
knew nothing of the ballet.

She did know, however, that his grandfather was mad: he was
a harmless lunatic, but sometimes he would wander through the
streets of Odense, wreathed in flowers, singing, and then the boys
would chase him and he would fly in terror. Hans Christian had
seen this and he was to be haunted by it, and by the fear of mad-
ness, all'his life.

He saw a great deal of insanity, for his grandmother, his father’s
mother, earned her living by tending the garden of the insane
poor, and it was the insane poor who were the first people to
whom Hans Andersen told stories.

Soon there were many others, for Hans Christian was driven by
a furious urge to give his treasure to the world, and he began in
his home town, as a small boy, by almost forcing his way into the
homes of the cultured people of the town and reading plays and
poems he had written to them. He would even stop people in the
street to read his works aloud to them, and when the coming of a
troupe of travelling players to Odense started his interest in the
theatre, his performance became almost formidable, for now he
was fired with the passion to go on the stage, and he not only read
his plays and poems but he insisted upon acting, dancing and
singing.

He never gave up this habit of forcing himself upon every
audience that he could, even strangers, into whose houses he
almost pushed his way for the purpose.

This and his oversensitivity leads all his biographers to attribute
a naive vanity to him, but I think there is a very different
explanation. The point which I want to illustrate by the story of

244 GUILT

Hans Andersen is that the strongest passion in his life, the passion
which brought fame in the end, was not vanity or ambition, but
the absolute need to be in communion with other men, to be one
with them, as those who love are one. Hans Christian did not
merely believe in his own genius, he knew what he had to give.
He knew that he had a treasure beyond all price, a gift of sheer
beauty, that once it was given would become part of the ex-
perience of beauty, of people in all ages, all over the world.

A good-looking, well-dressed youth, educated in a cultured
home, might have gone about it in a seemingly more modest way
—but only the whirlwind in Hans Christian’s soul could drive him
out from himself, past all the obstacles that were between that

hidden beauty and those he must give it to.

These obstacles increased as he grew older. From the start the
gift of beauty had to get past his grotesquely ugly appearance,
his ignorance, his own fears and inhibitions caused by his crazy
grandfather and his beloved but neurotic father, his ill-fitting
shabby clothes. Added to these things, his mother remarried and
his stepfather, a worthless, lazy man, content to let his wife help
to support him, began the long series of cruel discouragements
that afflicted Hans Christian so deeply. He disliked the boy and
refused him affection or even interest. The mother, tormented by
rheumatism brought on by years of standing in the stream to do
her washing, started to drink, and gradually the woman that was
so beloved to the strange, lonely son, became blurred and
obliterated by the tippler that she had become; long before the
poor old woman died, the mother he loved became a memory to
her son. Added to all the other barriers between Hans Christian
and the world, was the shame of his mother’s drinking, which
everyone in Odense knew about.

When he was fourteen, Hans Christian set out alone with thirty-
five shillings, his entire fortune, the savings of his whole life, in
his pocket, to seek his fortune in Copenhagen. He had no edu-
cation and no experience, and incidentally, no talent for his
chosen profession, the stage. Many attempts had been made to ©
persuade him to take up a trade, but he refused. “It would be a
very great sin,” was the final form of his refusal. Nobody under-

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 945

stood, but nobody could yet understand what this beautiful thing,
which it would be “ a very great sin” not to give to the world, was.
They could not understand because—one more of the obstacles in
his way—Hans Christian did not yet know what it was himself;
he had not yet found his medium, and he had not yet suffered
those things through which he was to enter into his glory, he knew
only that he had to give the beauty in him somehow. He tried to
dance, and his dancing was like that of a frenzied scarecrow; he
tried to sing, and his voice, which had been like a bird’s before,
broke. He wrote pretentious plays and bad poetry. He was refused
and rejected everywhere. Before his hour came he was to be
sifted like grain. Before he could give a voice to all the
inarticulate poetry in man’s soul, he was to taste the sordid and
ugly realism of life. Before he was to tell the incommunicable
secrets of all human hearts, he was to accept the loneliness of
unrequited love. For Hans Christian, who before he started on
that brave journey to Copenhagen knelt down and put himself
into the hands of God, would not be allowed by God to give any-
thing but his own unique gift; he would not be allowed to give
instead a passing entertainment to a small audience, or happiness
to one woman.

Hans Christian was willing to suffer any hardship rather than
commit the sin of forsaking his vocation. To his old mother, who
had pleaded with him to give up the stage as his ambition because
she believed that he would be beaten and starved in the training,
he had answered, “That is nothing .. . first one suffers the most
awful things and then one becomes famous.” And suffer he did.
He endured hunger and cold, discouragement and fear; he slept
in a dark, airless cupboard, he drew one humiliation after another
upon himself. When at last, as the result of his extraordinary
persistence, he was given assistance by the State and his education
began, he endured worse torment than ever before. For the school-
master Meisling with whom he was sent to board loathed him
with the loathing that someone corrupt always feels for someone
transparently pure, and someone coarse and insensitive feels for
one who is innately fine and sensitive. And Hans Christian was
pure and sensitive and had a natural nobility of mind. Meisling

246 GUILT

used every possible means to torment his victim; he ridiculed and
reviled him before the others, he denied him all pleasure and
recreation, he half starved him at his table, he forbade him to
write poetry; and cruellest of all to the boy haunted by the crazy
grandfather in Odense, he told him that he would go mad. And
as if he was trying to accelerate the fact, he dragged him to wit-
ness at close quarters the public execution, by beheading, of a
young man and woman.

Meisling’s wife was equally bad. She was a wanton, immoral
woman, notoriously unfaithful to her husband, and a slut. She
made unsuccessful attempts to seduce the boy, now growing to
manhood, and violated his sense of decency by a continual flow of
obscene talk. The Meislings’ home was dirty, an acute misery to
Hans Christian, who was homesick for the one room where he
spent his childhood in Odense with its scrubbed wooden floors,
its scoured and shining pots and pans, and its snowy white
curtains.

The family who had become guardians to Hans Christian were
fine and good, and they took him to their heart, but their heart
was constricted so rigidly by reserve and convention that it was
sometimes difficult to know that it was beating. The Collin family
remained loyal, and in their undemonstrative way devoted, to
their odd protegé all his life; but they were always faintly shocked
by him. To them a display of emotion caused something like
physical pain, and Hans Christian was always pouring himself
out in unrestrained expressions of affection and gratitude. The
one thing that he was reserved about was Meisling’s cruelty; a
mixture of extraordinary courtesy and extraordinary kindness of
judgment made it impossible for him to complain to Collin. In-
deed, though he was supersensitive, in continual need of encour-
agement and hurt most cruelly by the smallest criticism of his
work, he never gave way to self-pity. His courtesy prevented him
later on from uttering a single word of his grief to the women who
rejected his love.

The outbursts, sometimes storms of tears, when his work was
criticised, came not from wounded vanity but from the old
agonized longing to give the thing he had to give, and then

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 247

supposing it to be refused, or taken and reviled when he thought
he was giving it.

Only at the very end of his life, when in fact he had given all
he had to give and he had no more stories to tell, did Hans
Andersen ever receive encouragement and stimulus from anyone
dear to him. All through the struggling years of his youth, his
mind was as famished for sympathy and encouragement as his
great gaunt body was for food. Destructive criticism, and he
received little else, aggravated the deep inward discouragement
that he was always trying to crush.

The fact that Hans Christian was only at ease with those who
had some physical disadvantage or with the very poor proves that
the other social contacts and friendships which he sought had to
be paid for in embarrassment. What seems to many critics to
have been the bumptiousness of a conceited young man was in
reality the over-compensation that arose from his sense of
inferiority.

Whomever he visited, he held in reverence. He never ap-
proached any human being without making the best of himself,
and he could never forget that outwardly, even at his best, he was
grotesquely ugly. When he went visiting he brushed his thread-
bare coat almost into holes, and once, unfortunately for him on a
blazing hot day, stuffed it with straw to hide his extreme thinness,

The woman with whom Hans Christian was most at ease, and
who came closer to him in sympathy than anyone else, was
Henrietta Wulf, the little dwarfed, deformed daughter of Com-
mander Wulf. He never ceased to love and to provide what he
could for his poor old mother, and success did not prevent him
from going back to Odense and hugging her in the street, even
when she was the old drunkard stranger to him that she became,
Among his happiest memories was a night in Sweden, when he
was already famous, when he sat up until nearly dawn to make
new shapes for an old peasant woman who baked gingerbread.

Three times Hans Christian fell in love. He longed for a home
and family with the intensity realized only by those whose home
has been broken in childhood, as his was. His first serious love
was for Riboury Voight, the sister of a student friend. She seems

248 GUILT

to have returned his love, but she was already engaged and felt
herself to be bound in honour not to break her engagement. So
Hans Christian was exiled from her life. Louise Collin and Sophie
Orsted slipped away from him, Louise with the evasive tactics
of all the Collins, and Sophie with the blithe unconcern of one
who was quite unaware that he was trying to summon up courage
to propose to her, and was in love with another man.

Jenny Lind, whom he could have worshipped as well as loved,
refused his offer of marriage with graciousness peculiar to herself
that made it possible, indeed inevitable, that he should keep her
friendship.

All these deep personal sorrows Hans Christian accepted in
silence. Such was the dignity which distinguished him even as the
poor shabby child of the washerwoman, and never forsook him
even when his nerves broke in old age.

“First one suffers . . . then one becomes famous.” But becoming
famous meant to Hans Andersen giving the pearl of great price,
for which he had paid with all that he had, and all that he could
not have.

Through the denial of his individual love, the love of all man-
kind passed through the poet’s soul, and his little loves, that might
have been passing things and forgotten had they been successful,
are left in the world for as long as a child remains in it to enshrine
them in his heart.

Henrietta Wulf, the little hunchback, is dear to every child in
Thumbelina, who was only an inch high. Jenny Lind’s song, which
must have died in the singing, lives on in the Nightingale who
charmed away death from the king’s heart. Hans Andersen him-
self is immortal, not only in the Ugly Duckling but in the Hardy
Tin Soldier, who melted away in the fire of love and was found in
the morning in the shape of a heart.

Once when he was in Portugal, Hans Christian compared the
soft warm Portuguese wind to a bridal kiss. “But,” he broke out,
when he had said it, “I do not know what a bridal kiss is like! I
imagine so much, I know so little!”

But Hans Andersen fulfilled his humanity. The cost to himself
was shown when the effort was over. When it was no longer

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 249

necessary for him to wrestle with the obstacles between him and
other people, with his own inhibitions and fears and torments,
they broke in and invaded him.

Odense had been illuminated for him; he had gone back to his
beloved people to receive their homage in torchlight processions,
bonfires, singing and banqueting, and the old torturing shyness
was still upon him—it even brought on his toothache, as it used
to do, and stabbed his hour of glory with physical pain. “I know
now,” he said on his way to his great reception, “what it feels like
to be going to your execution.”

But he went, as he had gone to everything, not because he
wanted his people’s homage, but because he wanted their love,
he wanted the communion, to be one with them all.

Only when the terrors he had been holding at bay, overcoming
daily and hourly all his life, broke over him was the heroism of
his life revealed. Then the thing he had wrestled with secretly and
alone was seen. He became the victim of obsessional neurosis, of
feelings of persecution, of hypochondria, of anxiety. He went in
continual fear of illness, accidents, of assassination, of being
robbed. Meisling stepped out of the past into his dreams and the
old torments returned. Collin, too, came into his dreams and
haunted him by his severity, and brought back his humiliation
of long ago when he was forced to ask him for new clothes. Then
he would awake weeping with remorse because he had. resented
imagined humiliations from Collin in his dreams.

He had abnormal fears of crossing open spaces, and of offend-
ing people. If he touched someone accidentally with his stick, he
wanted to find them again to placate them.

He had obsessional anxiety about missing trains, about blowing
out his candle, about putting his letters in the wrong envelopes.
He went to the trains an hour at least before the right time, and
got up again and again in the night to reassure himself about the
candle.

But Hans Christian had won the love he needed now, and in
the end he died surrounded and soothed by the love of friends.
He was taken to the country home of a cultured Jewish family,
the Melchiors, who loved him and shielded him from the popu-

250 GUILT

larity which had at last come to him and for which he had not
now the strength. And rest brought peace. He died in his sleep
at midday on the 4th of August, 1875.

Surely, when Hans Christian awoke from that sleep, in which
his beautiful soul drifted away from the worn-out, ugly body that
had hidden it, he who in the days of his suffering had written in
his diary, “Dear God! I could kiss you!” must have echoed the
words of his most moving story, “I never dreamed of so much
happiness when I was still the Ugly Duckling!”

FRANZ KAFKA

Tie WHOLE of Franz Kafka’s life was a search for God, frustrated
in the very depths of his being by his relationship with his father. .
This frustration undermined everything else in his life, and
unquestionably the continual conflict which it caused in one who
was acutely sensitive, acutely aware of good and evil, and
possessed by that rare quality among artists, a sense of responsi-
bility to other people as well as to himself, aggravated the illness
which caused his death at the age of forty-one.

His story is short and tragic, and it is told with profound insight
by his friend Max Brod, who is his only biographer, and his own
diaries, published, like most that he wrote, by Max Brod, after
his death. :

Kafka was born on the 8rd July, 1883 in Prague; that lovely
old city, built like the setting of a fairy story, destined to be a
martyr city, was an apt cradle for him. His father was what is
usually called a “self-made” man (and certainly he was one made
what he became more by self than by God). He was, when Franz
was born, a wealthy Jewish merchant, who came from humble
beginnings and had worked his way up with much hardship and
grit, and who gave the impression that he felt a kind of grudge
against his children for the sufferings of his own boyhood. He
was a hearty, insensitive type, toughened yet more by his struggle
for success in business, and incapable of understanding his
scrupulous, oversensitive son. The boy’s genius meant nothing to
him; he had not the smallest interest in his writing, or in literature
at all, a fact which gives extraordinary pathos to an extract from
a letter that Franz wrote to him: “My writings were about you,
in them I merely poured out the lamentations I could not pour
out on your breast.”

251

252 GUILT

The letter containing these words was never read by the father;
it was written when Kafka was thirty-six years old, in a futile
attempt to break down the now insurmountable barrier between
father and son. It is not easy to think, in view of both of their
characters, that it would have done so, had the older man read it,
and evidently the mother thought not, as when it was handed to
her to give to her husband, she intercepted it and persuaded
Franz not to see it delivered. Part of this letter is still unpublished,
part is published in Max Brod’s book.* Even a few extracts from
it tell the story of Franz Kafka’s soul, better than anyone else can
do it. But first, a brief outline of the events of his life, to which
the extracts refer.

To please his father, and to meet the idea of self-respect formed
by his admiration for his father, which seems to have been
indestructible, he took up a business career to earn his bread and
butter; he was partly motivated, too, by a wish to keep his writing
free and “unspotted by this world.” His business life was hateful
to him, and he had not realized until too late that his body was
not strong enough to live two men’s lives. To some extent the
artist had to be frustrated, which in itself was fatal to his energy.

He graduated as a doctor of Law, and then worked in an
insurance company.

He became engaged twice, but broke off the engagement twice,
giving reasons which were clearly only a blind for the real one.

In 1914 he became ill with tuberculosis, the result of the con-
flict in his life, and he was retired on a pension.

Throughout his life he consciously sought for God, God whom
he had lost in the darkness of his father’s personality, and to
whom he had been blinded in the superficiality and materialistic
conception and practice of his father’s Judaism. He realized that
knowledge of God must be knowledge of experience, and
assimilated into his being; it could not be outside of his deepest
experiences.

For so long as the love of a woman meant marriage to him, it
forced him back to his old attempt to identify himself with his
father, and resulted in the painful comparison in which his

* Franz Kafka: A Biography

FRANZ KAFKA 253

humiliation was grounded. He was humiliated by his own body,
and his sense of inferiority, physical weakness, and guilt—guilt
before the father—made the physical expression of love seem
disgusting to him, and himself in every way unfitted to found
a family.

He tended more and more to search for God in orthodoxy and
made a profound study of the Hebrew scriptures, and intended
for a time to emigrate to Palestine—a pathetic symbol in the
young Jew of going back to the bosom of the Father.

With these events, which bring us to the last year of his tragic, °

short life, in mind, the extracts from his letter may be read, start-
ing from his childhood:

“I was a nervous child, but I was certainly sulky too, as children
are; it is also true that my mother spoiled me, but I can’t believe
that I was a particularly difficult child, I can’t believe that a
friendly word, taking me quietly by the hand, a friendly glance,
would not have got me to do anything that was wanted. Now at
bottom you are a kind and gentle man (what I am about to say
doesn’t contradict this; I am talking only of the appearance you
presented to the child), but not every child has the patience and
the courage to go on looking until it has found the good side. You
can only handle a child in the way you were created yourself,
with violence, noise and temper, and in this case moreover.you
thought this was the most suitable way, because you wanted to
bring me up to be a strong, prave eye

Ve
And another memory of his childhood:

“You had worked yourself up to such a position by your own
strength, that you had unlimited confidence in your own opinion.
. -» From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was
right, everybody else’s was mad, eccentric, crazy, not normal. At
the same time your self-confidence was so great that there was
no need for you to be consistent, and yet you were always right.

. For me you developed the bewildering effect that all tyrants
have whose might is founded not on reason, but on their own
person.

“From the standpoint of every little thing you convinced me

=~

254 GUILT

both by your example and the way you brought me up... .
of my incapability. .. .

“Courage, decision, confidence, pleasure in this or that, could
not hold out to the end, if you were opposed to it... .

“In front of you I lost my self-confidence and exchanged it for
an infinite sense of guilt... .

“My opinion of myself depended more on you than on anything
else... .”

Referring to the weakness and indecision in himself which led

to Franz’s breaking of his engagement, he speaks in his diary of
“a will broken by my father,” and in the famous letter he says:
“The chief obstacle to my marriage is the conviction which I can
no longer eradicate, that to keep a family, particularly to be the
head of one, what is necessary is just what I recognize you have
—just everything together, good and bad, just as it is organically
united in you, viz. strength and contempt for others, health and
a certain excess, eloquence and standoffishness, self-confidence
and dissatisfaction with everybody else, superiority to the world
and tyranny, knowledge of the world and distrust of most people
in it, and then advantages with no disadvantage attached, such
as industry, endurance, presence of mind, fearlessness. Of all
these qualities I had comparatively almost nothing, or only very
little, so how should I dare to marry under such conditions when
I saw that even you had a hard struggle in your married life, and
even failed as far as your children were concerned?”
' One might almost imagine, at this point, that Kafka’s lifelong
preoccupation with his father was not based on love for him, in
spite of his obvious wish to be identified with him, through just
those things that were impossible. But it was, quite transparently
his father whom he sought to find in his Judaism when he tried
to find his faith fully in that; but the father who had shut the
door, it seemed, on marriage had also discouraged the boy’s
religious faith by his own lack of it.

He writes “I found just as little escape from you in the Jewish
faith. Here, in itself was a possible escape, nay more, it would
have been possible for us to have found each other in Judaism,
or at least for us to have found in it a point from which we could

FRANZ KAFKA 955

have travelled the same road. But what kind of Judaism did I get
from you!” and there follows a description of the visits together to
the synagogue, and the shallow and even ludicrous nature of the
father’s formal religion.

But this little boy who was looking for the father whom he
could adore, remembered moments that he cherished, when he
felt close to the poor man who all unknowingly set a stumbling-
block in his path. He describes two or three of these moments and
ends “. . . during my last illness, you came softly to my room to
see me, stopped at the door, just stuck your head in, and out of
consideration for me, only waved a hand to me. On occasions like
this one lay down and cried for joy, and is crying now as one
writes about it.”

In the last year of his life, Kafka at last fell in love, and this
time more really than before, with the result that, that which all
his own efforts to overcome the humiliation in his soul had failed
to do, this love began to do. It is not so amazing as it seems that
this happened to him, because Kafka never succumbed to the
hesitations and fears that beset him, as nine out of ten people in
his circumstances and with his temperament would have done.
He violated his own will, and drove himself hard against his own
nature, in his pitiful but heroic effort to be that which his father
could approve. He shrank inwardly from the double responsibility
which he conceived it his duty to face and accept, but he did
accept it, and he achieved the miracle of writing books of genius
and living the life of a business man at the same time. There are
some artists who could do this without a miracle—at least they
could write books—but Kafka was one who could do nothing
without intensity; it was this fact which wore out the frail body
that had caused him so much shame, but proved him so much
more manly than his tough father, and this same intensity and
Slt giving that drove him on in his search for God all through

is life.

The deep sense of guilt which his relationship with his father
had so aggravated dogged him to the end, and at the end of his
life translated itself into a profound consciousness of the sinfulness
of all mankind as an almost hopeless obstacle to union with God.

256 GUILT

After living for a short time with the Jewish girl whom at last
he loved, he was taken to a sanatorium to die. He had intended
to marry her, and this time he would have done so, but death
prevented it. Her love was as brave and deep as his and gave him
a brief independence and capacity for joy. He was able to love
and pity objectively, and as he was dying, to take pleasure in
seeing others enjoy the things he could enjoy no longer, food and
drink and so on.

For a while he lay in a ward in a bed next to that of another
dying man; he noticed without envy and rejoiced in the fact, that
when everyone, even the doctors and nurses, had left this poor
man, a priest came to him and stayed with him to the end, and
that he was able to comfort the man and give him peace.

It is impossible not to believe that when, soon after, Franz
Kafka himself died, without any religious consolation, he at last
found the adorable Father he had been seeking all his life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

AMONG THE YOUNGER generation of poets and would-be poets,
Rilke is often venerated as the saint of poetry. Yet if ever a man
failed to surrender himself to the destiny that genius must accept,
it was he.

Just as the soul of a contemplative is laid open to tremendous
spiritual forces, the soul of a poet is laid open to the agelong
forces of humanity, to the collective love of the whole human
race. If then, he is quite incapable of love himself, inevitably he
will be brought to ruin by his destiny.

Rilke left some of the most exquisite poetry that the world has
ever known, but it is beautiful as wonderfully set jewellery is
beautiful, and has the coldness of precious stones too, flashing off
sparks of light, sometimes blushing with eroticism and glowing
like rubies, more often radiating pinpoints of pale, flashing
colour, like a cut diamond. It is not poetry that has swept through
the heart of mankind; it has not even, one cannot help feeling,
really passed through Rilke’s single heart, or if it has it has passed
through it as swiftly as the rush of an angel’s wings, picking up
nothing from his human nature on the way.

Rilke is a tragic example of the man who is a failure and of the
genius that is partly frustrated by incapacity to love.

Certainly everything was against him, even his charm, which
made life too easy for him after its beginning.

The beginning was not easy. He was a seven-months’ child,
and because he was not a girl, a disappointment to his mother;
a little later, because he failed to be a boy, a disappointment to
his father.

His father, having had to give up a military career for financial
reasons, wanted to project his ambitions onto his son. His mother

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258 GUILT

dressed him like a girl, gave him dolls to play with, and alternately
spoilt and neglected him. She was an exhibitionist herself, and
the worst kind of pietist, over-fervent but incapable of wedding
her religion to her life. If it is the mother who lays the foundations
of the child’s faith, it is not surprising that in Rilke’s case they
crumbled away like sand. While he was still a child his mother
left him and his father, and his future relationships with her were
like those with so many women in his life, a little unreal and
carried on almost entirely by correspondence.

At ten years old, already a shivering, neurotic child and one
still young enough to need mothering, he was sent to the Military
Academy, where—need it be said?—he was bullied unmercifully.
He never recovered from the torture of his school life. At one
time he believed it his duty to the world and himself to purge
his system of it by writing it into a book, but he lacked the
courage to re-live his suffering even when it was far behind him
in time.

As a young man he exhibited a mass of guilt feelings, which of
course he never faced in the open. He became obsessed by senti-
mentalities for young girls, but wished them to remain virgins and
regarded marriage with one of them as a crime, even a murder.
This was linked up with a curious fascination with the idea of the
deaths of young girls which haunted him all his life—a peculiarity,
by the by, which he shared with Dickens. He also associated
roses, which were also almost an obsession with him, with young
girls, and this is a peculiarity that he shared with another writer,
Ruskin, who was also almost unbalanced about young girls and
roses, perhaps because the girl who came closest to turning his
brain was named Rose.

Rilke was an unsacramental man, he could not realize the one-
ness of soul and body. Though many women gave him homage
that approached a religious cult, and some loved him with gen-
uine love, he could give nothing in response; on his side, “love”
and even friendship was seldom anything else but a self-seeking,
over-intellectualized, over-analyzed eroticism.

Yet at the beginning of his adult life he was capable of hero

RAINER MARIA RILEE 959

worship, and once came close to sacrificing his own genius for it,
a sacrifice which would not have been justified, though it warms
one a little to the man to think that he was ever for a moment
capable of contemplating it. It was to Rodin that the young poet
brought his homage, his admiration for the old sculptor came
nearer than anything else in his life to love; he offered him his
services as a secretary and for a brief time worked hard in his
service. The arrangement ended disastrously, as it clearly had to,
and Rodin dismissed his secretary suddenly and rather brutally.
But there must have been relief as well as distress for Rilke in
the dismissal which set him free to write poetry again.

Now he acted consistently with his one object, of holding fast
to his own vocation of poetry, and he was convinced that this was
his duty, cost what it might. But this meant, cost what it might to
others, his wife and child and his many wealthy women friends,
for the first essential, in his own view, for his genius, was that it
should cost him nothing. His problem was to live fastidiously, as
his temperament demanded, in luxury and without the irksome
necessity of having to work for his living. But more, he must have
solitude, absolute silence and peace in these ideal surroundings.
This problem was solved for him by the fanatical devotion of his
women friends. On the whole he cultivated only aristocratic and
wealthy women friends, and spent nearly the whole of his life
living on their hospitality in their country houses and castles.

He had married a young sculptress, Clara, and had one child
by her, Ruth. The question of providing for them never troubled
him, though when the success of some of his books and the
generosity of his publisher brought him some ready money, he
was generous to them, from a distance. For of course he was
ingenious in avoiding their presence with its distractions and its
demands on him. E. M. Butler, Rilke’s biographer, writes of his
relationship to his only child:

“As for Ruth, Rilke visited her when he was in Germany, which
was not very often, wrote to her fairly regularly, spoke of her
fondly and even sentimentally; but seemed as totally unaware of
his responsibilities as if he were an astral body, tenderly surveying

260 GUILT

some human child, whose destiny was no concern of his. He was
often poetical about her but hardly ever paternal.”°

Anything which threatened to force the common lot of men
upon Rilke brought his always ready self-pity to a crisis. Natu-
rally, the War in 1914 was a disaster to him, though with typical
absence of humour about himself, he first greeted it with heroic
poetry in praise of war! This pose collapsed after ten days of
service in the infantry, which brought Rilke near collapse too.
He was released to work in the Ministry of War, where he was
almost as wretched as he had been in the army, though his occu-
pation was almost formal and his working hours, from nine to
three, enviable. After the war he drifted back to the old life of
elegant sponging until his death. “Complete solitude, more, in-
visibility was his only desire.”} It became increasingly difficult to
please him, for now and then his hostesses made some slight de-
mands on him; they wanted to see and speak to him occasionally
in their own homes, and this he found selfish and inconsiderate.
Even when the ideal hostess lent him her castle and vacated it
herself, he was ever on the look-out for faults.

Naturally, a man seeking to avoid suffering, as Rilke did, suf-
fered more and more through less and less, and his search for
solitude and peace ended in the beating of his own heart becom-
ing a torment to him. He became less and less capable of the
receptivity on which genius, like religious contemplation, de-
pends, and consequently much of his time was arid and vain
waiting for the wind of Heaven, that came less and less often.

Rilke’s loss of faith was not, like that of Rimbaud, a revolt
against God, for revolt was not in his nature. He did not revolt
against God, but he shrank away from the suffering of Christ.
That heart of his that he could hear beating in his silence, beating
like a clock wearing out in an empty house, shrank smaller and
smaller, until it shrivelled up like a dead nut in its shell. His
shrinking from Catholicism was his shrinking from Christ, and
his shrinking from Christ was his shrinking from the Cross.

° E. M. Butler, Rainer Marta Rilke.
¢ E. M. Butler, Ibid.

RAINER MARIA RILKE 261

Once he wrote a letter that contains the thoughts he imagines
to be those of a “young worker” about Christ. E. M. Butler warns
us that it is not fair to conclude that it contains Rilke’s own
opinions, as he never published it or any of its contents, but it is
certainly very full of Rilke, who certainly never was a “young
worker.” He writes: “Who is this Christ who insinuates himself
into everything? Who has known nothing of us, nothing of our
work, nothing of our affection, nothing of our joy, such as we
today accomplish, endure, and summon up in ourselves, and who,
despite all this, it seems, always demands to be first in our lives.
Or do we only put that in his mouth? What does he want of us?
He wants to help us, we're told. Yes but he places himself with
singular helplessness in our presence. His circumstances were sO
completely different.”*

The explanation of this astonishing misstatement follows hard
on it: “I. cannot imagine that the Cross should remain, which was
never more than a crossroads. Certainly it should not have been
stamped on us everywhere like a brandmark.”

No, Rilke’s heart was too small to meet the love of God, or of
his wife or child, or of the friends who lavished all they could
upon him—but then, it was not even big enough to risk the
degree of suffering involved in the love one gives to a rabbit!

In June 1905, he wrote to Clara, “. . . yesterday and the day
before passed in worry over the little dog, which everybody in
the house loved so much; suddenly he grew ill and yesterday
evening he died in great torment.

“It is sad and hard for Lou and her husband. And once again
I felt distinctly that one should not draw into one’s life those
cares and responsibilities which are not necessary, just as I felt it
as a boy when my rabbit died.”

The last worry of the unhappy poet’s life was that he might not
die of an illness uniquely his, which no one else could ever share
—he refused to hear the illness from which he did die diagnosed,
and to discover, even in this, that after all he was like some other

©. M. Butler, Selected
York: Macmillan). Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1902-1926 (New

262 GUILT

men. He was afraid of death and hardly allowed the word in his
presence. Actually, he died of a rare form of blood poisoning,
which most aptly was accelerated in his case by a scratch from a
thorn when he was picking roses for a girl.

In the end he was alone, alone more than even he had ever
wanted, for he refused the Sacraments, and went into eternity an
empty shell of a man, excommunicated by his own egoism from
all his own kind.

RIMBAUD

WHEN A WRITER makes a short résumé of the main events in the
life of the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, one can tell in a flash,
from his selection, just what his own values are. In the same way,
from the mass of psycho-analytical theories applied to him, one
can see at once what theory the writer is determined to prove,
for in his tragic life there are symptoms of every possible morbid
psychological state, but at the same time there is always some
detail which baffles them all.

He was born on the twentieth of October, 1854, and by the
time he was seventeen he had already written poetry of outstand-
ing genius. Before he was twenty he had abandoned poetry alto-
gether. This much all those who write of him tell us. They usually
refer to a scandal with the poet Verlaine, to Rimbaud’s subsequent
life of restless and unproductive wandering in Abyssinia, and to
his return to die in France in 189].

The extraordinary spiritual crises which occurred with each of
these phases of his life are seldom noted, and even his return to
the Faith of his childhood on his death-bed, and with it a rebirth
of the poet in him, are often left unmentioned. In what is un-
questionably the greatest and fullest English biography, Arthur
Rimbaud, by Enid Starkie, these things are honestly related, but
some of them are drained of their significance by the writer's
personal interpretation.

I see in Rimbaud an example of a man—or a boy on the edge
of manhood—regressing suddenly to the pre-age-of-reason stage
of childhood (which I have described in “The Child in Man”),
in which the physical strength and capacities of a man are united
to the total irresponsibility of a child, who quite innocently has
no values but his own egoism, and no restraint but his own little-

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ness. Whether, in his case, this was a pathological or a spiritual
condition, I could not attempt to say. It could have been the
result of mental disease or of sin—there were circumstances
capable of producing either or both. I will be content to give just
the superficial facts that suggest my theory.

Until his early adolescence Rimbaud was a precocious and
pious little boy, of the type likely to rejoice any old lady’s heart.
He had golden hair and blue eyes, a round face, and the sensual
mouth which women find so pretty in a boy, and are so easily
misled by. His face was of the type that always keeps a certain
look of innocence; the type which arouses the suspicion of an
experienced plainclothes policeman, and enchants all others. If
poor Arthur delighted his mother’s heart, she did not show it. She
was a strange, hard woman, and brought her children up with
great severity.

During his adolescence the golden-haired, blue-eyed boy sud-
denly changed to a fiend.

The degeneracy and vice that he now exhibited, indeed
flaunted, ran so true to the pattern of revolt and viciousness
common to many artists in adolescence, that it is not even in-
teresting, excepting in so far as it points to disturbances on a much
deeper level, which may have brought it about. He became dirty,
cruel, ridiculously egotistical, drunken and vicious. He took to the
wandering so common in unstable adolescents, and among other
excursions ran away to Paris, where he had what was probably
his first experience of sex, with some common soldiers. Probably
this gave him a profound shock, for more than obvious reasons.
A genius is one through whom the universal experience of all
humanity must pass, his destiny is as sweet and as terrible as that
of a saint. The experience of the Christhood of all humanity must
pass through both the saint and the genius. In a certain sense,
the vocation to be a genius is the vocation to be a saint. Love is
the predominant experience of humanity, and if this is vitiated
the results can hardly not be disastrous.

Determined to be free of the shackles of his home with its
restrictions, its limitations and ugliness, he presented himself, in a
filthy and sulky condition, to Verlaine’s family, that is to Ver-

RIMBAUD 265

laine’s mother-in-law’s family, with whom Verlaine lived at the
time. He soon wrecked Verlaine’s marriage, though it is only just
to say that, without him, Verlaine would certainly have wrecked
it himself.

After this followed a violent and sordid relationship with Ver-
laine, during which Rimbaud continued to rage and fulminate
against all that was good or beautiful, to revel in every form of
obscenity and blasphemy, to pour out hatred and contempt on all
human beings—including, at intervals, Verlaine himself. He was
eager, and had been ever since this mood had broken out in him,
to give an impression of utter depravity, and Enid Starkie tells
us “he would invent lewd stories about himself, attributing to
himself monstrous and repulsive actions and he used then to be
overjoyed when people sitting near him in a café would get up
and leave the table.”* But she tells us, following this and her
opinion of the boy’s utter inward desolation: “The core of his
being was purity and innocence with a yearning for absolute
perfection.”} This is a view which many others share, and I
believe that, strange though it may seem, it has far more foun-
dation than his shadowless blue eyes.

When he himself refers, later on, to his “innocence,” there is a
profound tone of suffering in his voice: “I am no longer in love
with boredom. Frenzies, debauches, madness—how well I know
its outbursts and disasters—all my burden is laid down. Let us
contemplate without dizziness the huge extent of my innocence.”+

This is the innocence of the child misshapen by original sin,
but without the use of reason to make him responsible for sin.

At some critical moment in his life, Rimbaud failed to sur-
render to that tremendous destiny of allowing the universal
experience of mankind to pass through him, for the rest of
humanity—and his resistance broke him.

Partly during and partly after his experience with Verlaine
and his final parting from him, he wrote his last literary work,

° Arthur Rimbaud, p, 84,
+ Loc. cit.

t une Saison en Enfer; trans. Norman Cameron (London: John Leh-
mann ).

266 GUILT

Une Saison en Enfer—and after that, silence. Some people think
that in the disillusionment and bitterness of his spirit, he re-
nounced poetry deliberately, others that the fierce preciosity of
his genius had burnt itself out in a short time, and only dead
ashes remained. Personally, I think that when he refused his
spiritual destiny as a poet of genius, a terrible spiritual regression
threw him back to pre-rational innocence, with all its terror and
all its impotence. Just as a lunatic in this state often becomes
unable to speak as a man, and has to learn to talk (if he can)
like a baby, the poet in Rimbaud was unable to speak any more.

From this time, he not only wrote no more poetry, but he
became less and less able to accept life, and for a time more and
more fantastic in his egoism. He imagined, or pretended to, that
he could become equal to God, and that his vicious life, which
he was unable to enjoy, was a kind of inverted sanctity, a mar-
tyrdom, which would perfect in him the receptivity which he
thought essential in a great poet. He believed that, set free from
everything that bound and limited other men, he would become
the supreme poet-prophet the world awaited, and that he would
be then equal to God.

Many people, those who believe that amorality and innocence
are the same thing, suppose that during this phase of what seems
very like insanity, Rimbaud suffered no remorse. He said that he
did not. But he suffered more than remorse, something very like
what we believe the damned suffer—the acute awareness of God
realized from the despair of hell. This conflict between unimagi-
nable beauty and unimaginable misery is woven all through that
last work of his, and with it an ever recurrent sighing for that
other childhood of his, the true childhood before this one of
regression poisoned by his manhood.

It seems to me that he tells the story of this regression, of his
broken self, his failure and his silence, in these words: “Did I not
have once upon a time a lovable childhood, heroic and fabulous,
to be written on leaves of gold, an excess of good fortune? By
what crime or mistake have I deserved my present weakness? You
who claim that animals sob with grief, that sick men give up hope,
that dead men have bad dreams, see if you can tell the story of

RIMBAUD 267

my collapse and sleep. For my part, I can no more explain myself
than the beggar with his continual Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s.
I can no longer speak.”°

_ At all events after that the poet was silent in him, and every-
thing that he touched failed and turned to pain. He came back
from his restless wandering life in Abyssinia to throw himself
upon the compassion of his sister, whom he had neglected
throughout their lives, and who devoted herself to him until he
died. He came back destitute, mutilated, broken, and with the
same streak of childishness that he had displayed all through his
life, took it for granted that his own people would care and
provide for him. His sister did come to him, and it is from her
that the story of his dying has come to us.

He had flouted God, blasphemed and revolted against him,
tried to be equal to him, but he had never ceased to be conscious
of him, he had never been able to hide his wounds from him, he
had lived in'conflict with him, the poet in him seemingly defeated
and lost, the man in torment, living in the God-consciousness of
the damned. He had done all he could to escape, and now at last
the regressed child did attain the use of reason, and as he lay
dying Rimbaud received the Sacraments.

From that moment the poet in him came back, the old visions
surrounded him—not the visions of hell, but of angelic beauty—
and words were given to him again. He spoke in cadences of

sheer beauty, and the words streamed out of him without any |

effort; the lost poetry that he would now never give to the world
was given back to him: “Reason has been born within me. The
world is good. I shall give life my blessing. I shall love my
brethren. These are no longer the promises of a child. Nor are

they made in the hope of escaping from old age and death. God
is my strength, and I praise Go d.”

° From “Morning,” in Une Satson en Enfer; trans. Norman Cameron.

CHARLES DE FOUCAULD

CHARLES DE FoucauLp and Arthur Rimbaud were born within
five years of one another; Rimbaud in 1854, de Foucauld in 1858.
Both were Frenchmen, both were born in France. Throughout
their lives there was at the same time an extraordinary parallel
and an extraordinary contrast between them.

Had they been set side by side as little boys, the contrast in
their appearance would have been striking—and also misleading:
Rimbaud fair, blue-eyed, and smug, de Foucauld dark, arrogant,
with smouldering eyes and a sullen, obstinate mouth.

Both lost their Faith in adolescence. This, however, needs
qualifying. In her superb biography of de Foucauld, Desert
Calling, Anne Fremantle points out that “as there are milk teeth,
given the baby mouth to bite infant foods, so there is milk faith,
warmed through by the love that cradled it. . . . this initial gift of
nursery faith must grow with the child, and with him be trans-
formed and be made personal, individual. If this does not happen,
and only the ambient faith remains, like skin that sheltered the
pupa but is not integrated with it, then either the grown man
will slough it, or it will turn flame upon him as upon Nessus
and itch and burn until he, of his own free will, either gladly is
consumed or miserably tears it and his own flesh from him.” And
she adds, with equal penetration: “What Charles really lost was
his innocence.”

The same could be said of Rimbaud and of countless adoles-
cents.

Both de Foucauld and Rimbaud were lonely, unhappy adoles-
cents. Charles, an orphan from babyhood, Rimbaud brought up

® (New York: Henry Holt, 1949).
268

\

CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 269

by a strangely hard mother who almost orphaned him by her
severity, and who had been deserted by his father.

Charles was brought up by his grandfather, whom he idolized,
but the grandfather died when he was still a very young man,
leaving him emotionally alone.

Rimbaud had only one friend who understood him in his early
youth, a schoolmaster who was removed at the most critical stage
of his development.

Both young men abandoned themselves to lives of debauchery,
and seemed to want to swamp their loneliness and unhappiness in
lust and gluttony and drink,

And both changed suddenly, as if they could no longer tolerate
their own purposeless lives, and became travellers. Charles re-
turned to God, and after many years he returned to the desert,
the scene of his early travels, to become its apostle. But though
he loved the people of the desert and served them, he made not
a single convert, and in the end those whom he had come to serve
murdered him.

Rimbaud went to Abyssinia, and he too came to love its people,
but neither he nor Charles achieved anything that they had set
out to do.

When Rimbaud forsook his life of vice, he did not turn to God;
on the contrary he turned in on himself, and gradually became
isolated from other men; when he died, he died without a friend:
“Well, now, I shall ask for

me be off. But not one friendly hand! And where shall I find
succourP”®

When de Foucauld turned from his life of gluttony and lust,
he discovered the beauty of God, and when he died he was buried
with his lifelong friend, whom he had never ceased to love.

Both these men have significance for us, and their interrelation
can be worked out further; but now, briefly, the facts about
Charles de Foucauld, whom I cite to illustrate the effects upon a
man of his objective love fo, God.

After his grandfathe;’, death, as a young officer, Charles gave
himself up to a positive vulgarity of self-indulgence. He became

* Une Saison en Enfer, trans. Norman Cameron.

giveness for having fed on lies. And let ©

270 GUILT

grossly fat and repulsive through gluttony. His idea of having a
good time seems to have been sating himself, gorging and stuffing.
He made a great display of his extravagance in gluttony and
entertained lavishly; at this time, he who was to long for hiding
as deeply as Rilke did, but for quite different reasons, appears to
have had something of the exhibitionist in him, and in spite of his
aristocratic breeding, of which he was perfectly conscious, it is
difficult to avoid thinking that he was rather a cad.

He amused himself, as a young officer, by flouting the sensi-
bilities of his more conventional fellow officers and outraging
those of his superior officers. In particular he insisted upon
flaunting his liaison with his mistress, Mimi, even taking her with
_ him, and the regiment, to Africa. This naturally brought about a
good deal of embarrassment for Mimi (nothing at this time could
embarrass Charles), but she was treated like royalty, used the
name of the Vicomtesse de Foucauld, and for a time lived in what
was for her an earthly paradise, more so because she loved
Charles. However, this escapade led to his being dismissed from
the army. This did not worry him at all. He remained for the time
being in Africa, and already it had taken hold of his soul.

When the French army was called to active service in Algeria,
Charles wanted to be in the fighting. He volunteered as a private,
and was reinstated as sub-lieutenant—this time, however, at the
cost of Mimi!

In this campaign Charles met the man who was to remain his
lifelong friend, Laperrine, a fellow officer then, and he came to
love the common soldiers with the real love that is given only
when a man shares in the hardships and labours of his men. He
never lost this love and respect for the common soldier, and years
later when, as a priest, he ministered to them, wounded and dying
after fighting in the desert, he realized what the poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins was to realize—the Christlikeness of the soldier
in his sacrificed life.

Charles de Foucauld never went back to his life of luxury and
debauchery after this, but he was not yet converted; first there
was his marvellous, and now famous, secret journey through the
forbidden territories of Morocco, disguised as a poor Jew. That

CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 271

journey, apart from the obvious wonder and interest, and to him
the attraction of danger in it, had deep spiritual significance for
Charles. First of all, to maintain his disguise he had to be chaste,
and he had to be frugal. Secondly he saw men about him who,
though not Christian, were profoundly aware of the majesty of
God.

It is not only a man’s body that is purified by voluntary
abstinence and by simplicity in eating and drinking, but his mind
and soul; and Charles must have realized then, for the first time
in his life, the wonder of looking on stars and water and skies of
dawn, with clear eyes and a shadowless mind.

At all events, the young explorer had begun to love chastity and
poverty, and to long for silence in his soul like the silence of the
desert.

In 1888 his conversion came, or more truly it was completed.
Outwardly it seemed a lightning conversion, but it had been
gathering within him for very long, and was, on the natural level,
partly at least the result of his objective attitude to other people;
he had always had the power of observing others, of realizing
them as themselves, and learning from their lives.

There were the men who adored God in the desert, the soldiers
who sometimes were Conscious, sometimes unconscious Christs,
and then there was his own family, devoted Catholics, who had
something in their lives that Charles was nostalgic for—one in
particular, Marie de Bondy, his cousin, whom he had loved
deeply from his boyhood; and he attributed his conversion mainly
to her. Then there was his sister, named Mimi as his mistress had
been, and though she had little outward influence on him, she
loved him dearly and there can be no doubt of the fact that her
prayers were @ great tide of grace drawing him back to God.

It is of interest that Rimbaud, too, was followed through his
restless wandering life by the prayers of his devout but rather
dull little sister, and in the end it was her tide of grace that drew
his soul across the rive; Styx to God.

From the moment that Charles realized the reality of God, all
the objectivity in love of which he was capable went into his

that he was drawn right away from

love of God. The resy}; was

272 GUILT

self: not only from his own suffering—for he was to suffer deeply
in following his vocation—but also from the misery of his own
sins; and, most astonishing of all, from his temptations.

From the hour of his conversion he became naturally chaste.
It is amazing that this could be, since he had years of habitual
sensuality and indulgence behind him. St. Francis of Assisi, a far
more fastidious man than ever Charles had been, had to fight
his own rebellious human nature literally with fire and snow;
' St. Anthony the Great had to wrestle with the demons of his for
years in the desert. But Charles de Foucauld was simply set free.
He was given back a state of innocence.

Rimbaud attained the terrible innocence of a child in the pat-
tern of evil, but de Foucauld was given back the primal innocence

of the child in God’s image. He never wasted himself in remorse,
he never looked backwards at all. Having discovered the reality of
God, he could not think about anything else, least of all about
himself.

The one object of his life from the time of his conversion was
to live a life exactly like that of Christ in Nazareth. He did not
want to preach or even, at first, to become a priest—but to live
as a poor, unknown workman, working with his hands.

He tried to be a Trappist, but he did not find the life poor
enough and simple enough—he made himself as poor as any man
could, and his clothes were allowed to become as ragged, even as
dirty, as those of Labre. From the Trappists he went to Nazareth
and became the servant of the Poor Clares, living on bread and
water, dressed like a beggar, sleeping in a little hut at the convent
door, working most inefficiently as a gardener and odd-job man.
He was ideally happy; he rejoiced when the children threw
stones at him; and when the nuns, enchanted as they were and
edified and amused by their extraordinary servant, gave him dates
or sweets on feast days, he saved them and gave them to these
children.

But all the time the desert called him, and in the end he went
back, as a priest, to be the apostle of the desert. In spite of all
his labours there and of the superhuman love he poured out on
the tribesmen and the slaves there, he made no converts—not

CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 278

even one—but he said that the only essential thing was that the
Blessed Sacrament should be there, and it is a deeply moving and
deeply significant fact, that after the priest himself had been
sacrilegiously murdered and buried in the sand, the consecrated
Host in the monstrance was found thrown down and covered in
the sand close to his body. Significant too, that it was found by
French soldiers and given, with reverence and awe, by a soldier
to another soldier in Communion.

Rimbaud, in his arrogance and his misery, tried to be equal to
God. De Foucauld, in his humility and joy, became one with
God in his suffering and death.

His life in the desert was one long act of self-giving to Christ
in his brethren, one long act of love. He had longed for silence and
solitude, and to be unseen, even more than Rilke did, and one
would suppose that he would have found those things in the
desert. But he opened his heart—and what is so much more
drastic, his door—to all the most needy: the soldiers who came
out on military service, the outcasts of the desert, the derelict, the
unwanted, the rejected, the negro slaves. It need not be said that
his charity was abused; he was exploited, taken in, drained of
everything, given no mercy by these people, in whom he con-
tinued to look for, and to see, Christ. In the end, some of the
tribesmen, those whom he had come to save, murdered him.

He offered no reproach when they came, spoke no word,
showed no anger and no fear. One of them shot him at close
quarters, through the head, with a revolver; he died instantly.

In the last months of his life, his lifelong friend, Laperrine, had
come back as an officer to the desert, and the two men, who under-
stood one another so well, had enjoyed the friendship that their
long separation had not broken. When Laperrine died he was
buried beside de Foucauld in Tamanrasset. And when it was
thought necessary to remove the body of the priest at the time
of the opening of his process of beatification, they left his heart in
the desert, buried in the soldier's grave with him.

“One part of me,” Charles de Foucauld said in his lifetime,
“is in the pure sky, that js always above the clouds, but with the
other part I love. It is my imperious sweet duty to love mankind

274 GUILT

passionately and to be interested in whatever is of serious concern
to them.”

It was said of him by one who knew him personally, that, at the
end of his life, this man of sorrows so radiated joy that one had
the curious idea that if one listened, one would hear someone
singing inside him!

“It is my imperious sweet duty to love mankind passionately.”

POSTSCRIPT

“Destroy self-love, and there is no more Hell.” —st. BERNARD

THE VITAL QUESTION for anyone suffering from ego-neurosis is,
is there a cure for it?

There is a cure. It is to be found in the first chapter of the
children’s catechism. It is to know God, and to love and serve him.

The first ‘step towards a cure, with this as with every other
disease, is to recognize it for what it is and honestly want to be
cured, Only a strong will to be cured will make it possible for
anyone to make the repeated efforts necessary.

There are many more ego-neurotics who do not recognize what
they are suffering from than who do; and more among Catholics
who fail to recognize it than among non-Catholics. There is
another reason, too, which makes the cure of ego-neurosis in a
Catholic much more difficult than in a person with no religion
at all, or with a vague and formless religion—the Catholic ego-
neurotic is convinced that he does know, love and serve God; in
fact, he frequently mistakes his self-love for the love of God, and
in all his pious exercises, mortifications and good works he
devoutly loves and serves himself. It is almost impossible to make
a Catholic ego-neurotic of this type realize that what he believes
to be knowledge of Gog is only a travesty of God. Clearly it is
necessary to know before we can love or serve, and the ego-
neurotic who is deluded about this basic necessity is deluded all
through,

The beginning of getting to know God truly is to look away
from self to God, to redirect the whole concentration of one’s
mind. This seems obviously an absurd suggestion to one who is

275

276 GUILT

convinced that his long sessions of self-absorption and daydream-
ing are prayer, and a certain restful broodiness before the taber-
nacle is contemplation.

A person who has no definite beliefs, who is quite uninformed
or uncertain about Christ’s revelation, or even about the teaching
of his own Church, is likely to feel his lack and his need for the
knowledge of God. Not only that: if he begins to learn by reading
the Gospels, he will be capable of reacting to the wonder of
something that is new to him, whilst the Catholic will be so
familiar with what he reads that he can hardly feel any shock of
amazement, fear or joy in any of it. What is more serious, the
Catholic may fail to grasp the truths he reads because he is too
familiar with them; he will accept them, but without astonish-
ment, without really laying hold of them or seeing their signifi-
cance in his own life.

The Catholic ego-neurotic is then the hardest case; while the
treatment, or rather the preparation for the cure, will be the same
for Catholic and non-Catholic, the Catholic will have to make a
much greater effort to be rid of all his preconceived ideas, and to
approach the knowledge of God as something new to him.

How are both Catholics and non-Catholics to find out whether
they really are suffering from ego-neurosis or not? I think by the
experiment of trying the cure and discovering whether the symp-
toms become less painful. If anyone suffers from scrupulosity,
hypersensitivity, acute shyness, if he believes that he is persecuted,
misjudged, frustrated or denied the adulation due to him, let him,
instead of presuming that he knows God and himself, assume for
a week that he knows nothing at all about God or himself, and
begin to learn about God as humbly as a newly converted native
in the African jungle.

The cure will begin by reading about God. For some the read-
ing should begin with the Bible, the New Testament and the Old,
but for those who have been reading the New Testament blindly
for years, it will be better to read some books which expound the
doctrines in it, so that after this they will read the Bible with
more realization of the depths of mystery in it. The Bible, the
Epistles, and some hard-headed books of dogma and theology

POSTSCRIPT 277

will be essential for everyone to start with, followed by some of
the great spiritual classics and the books of the saints. Merely
pious devotional books should be avoided, though these will
have their use later.

Each one will have to find which books, out of a great range
to choose from, best suit his mind, and best exercise it, for this
reading is intended, while giving knowledge about God, to wean
the mind gradually from its concentration on self and its wholly
subjective fantasies about God. A little wrestling with the angel
will help to this end.

The next stage in the cure will be to get to know God ex-
perimentally, not now getting to know about God, but getting to
know him. Objective prayer will be the first step. This must be
prayer of adoration and thanksgiving to God for being as he is,
lifting the mind out of its habitual wallowing in the “prayer” of
self-pity and self-love.

Next the objective attitude to God, which is being learned, must
also be practised towards man, and this can not be done in a
better way than through practising the contemplation of Christ
in man. It is at this point that the knowledge of God becomes
one thing with the love and service of God. We do not see Christ
in man, but now we know that he is in man, in those of our own
household in whom he is most hidden from us. A continual seek-
ing for him in them, an unfailing effort to penetrate his disguise
and to discover in which of the infinite variety of ways possible to
him Christ is living in each one of those who are part of our
own lives, cannot fail to draw off the concentration from self; and
the necessity to serve Christ in others cannot fail to break down
the barriers of self-protection, self-consciousness and self-love
which lead to the frustration of the uncured ego-neurotic.

Although the Catholic ego-neurotic has greater difficulties to
overcome in the initia] Stages of cure, he has the enormous help
of the Sacraments and the Mass. It is not only in others that he
must know Christ, if he is to overcome the strangling inhibitions
of his self-love and gain the courage to live the creative life of
love and compassion towards other men.

Only the knowledge that it is Christ who acts in him, who

278 GUILT

speaks through his mouth and works with his hands, will enable
the ego-neurotic to overcome his shrinking from human contacts,
his undefinable fears, his shyness, self-consciousness, and his sense
of personal humiliation.

The Sacraments and the Mass increase and strengthen the life
of Christ in the soul.

The possibilities of the Sacrament of Penance as a cure for ego-
neurosis have already been described. All the Sacraments increase
Christ's life and his power in the soul, and so increase its courage
and confidence before life.

Baptism gives Christ’s life. We call it Christening, which means
simply Christing, making one a Christ. The Holy Communion is
_ receiving Christ whole and entire and through him becoming
one with all other men. Confirmation gives the Holy Spirit to the
spirit of man, floods him with the glory of Christhood. Matrimony
enables men and women to increase Christ in one another through
natural love. Holy Orders enables men to increase Christ in the
whole world through supernatural love. Extreme Unction brings
the strength of Christ’s trust to enable man to surrender himself
to the eternal love in the hour of death.

Finally in the Mass, the ego-neurotic has a complete cure for
ego-neurosis. He can, if he will, find his cure in a perfectly
objective, Christo-centric participation in daily Mass.

At Low Mass every day, concentrated into a short half-hour of
time, is the whole life of man—the pattern of the life which, if it
is lived out in the same way, restores man to his real sanity and
is a cure not only for ego-neurosis itself, but for guilt which is
the cause of ego-neurosis.

Briefly the structure of the Mass is this. First, man comes out
of his hiding, and in the power of the Trinity puts himself into
the presence of God. (From the Sign of the Cross to the end of
the Confiteor)

In the light of God he knows himself and acknowledges himself
to be a sinner, he asks for forgiveness and comes closer to God.
Now he breaks into a song of praise and joy; he is looking away
from his sins to God’s glory. (From the end of the Confiteor to
the end of the Gloria)

POSTSCRIPT 279

He listens to the words that reveal God to him, and learns more
about God; he professes his faith in him. (From the end of the
Gloria to the end of the Creed )

And now he surrenders himself wholly to his Christhood, he
offers himself to be made inseparable from Christ, to share his
destiny. (From the end of the Creed to the Consecration)

Now he is restored to his Christhood, with Christ he enters
into his Passion, in him he is lifted upon the Cross, in him he
adores God, with him he redeems man. (From the Consecration
to the Communion)

Finally he receives Christ into his soul again, and in communion
with him becomes one with all men, and goes out from Mass to
carry Christ into the world in which he lives his daily life.

This is the concentrated plan of man’s life, ending as life itself
will end when it is lived on this plan, with “Deo gratias—Thanks
be to God.”